How to sequence a shortcut to a file extension using App-V v5
~ Philip McLoughlin
Hi everyone, I recently came across an interesting issue with App-V v5 and I wanted to share it in case anyone else happened to see it. I was working with a customer who had sequenced a shortcut to an HTA file but when the app was launched on a client it failed with an error saying Path Not Found.
Originally the customer had published the app and added the HTA to the Virtualizable extensions on the client but that failed with the same error, so we decided to re-sequence it and use MSHTA.EXE as the local executable on the command line. By doing this we could pass the HTA file extension to the executable and add the /appvve switch specifying the package_version GUID so they would all be inside the VE. Here’s an example of the command line we used:
C:\Windows\System32\mshta.exe "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\AppV\Client\Integration\C734FF87-00E8-49A6-829F-086A94F69936\Root\Crest.hta" /appvve:C734FF87-00E8-49A6-829F-086A94F69936_858A0A78-7ADD-4FA4-BC71-95DD8EEA2404
This did in fact work but adding the HTA to the Virtualizable extensions should have done the job so we wanted to see if we could figure out what was going on. To test this further we did the following:
- We added HTA to the following registry key on the App-V client:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\AppV\Client\Integration\VirtualizableExtensions"="exe,com,bat,cmd,vbs,ps1,cpl,jar,wsf,wsh,msc,hta
- We then restarted the client and published the app.
At this point we checked the command line and saw that it had changed to:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\AppV\Client\Integration\B95D3A14-7FE5-4018-AB11-06BF38BB65E4\Root\Crest.hta /appvve:B95D3A14-7FE5-4018-AB11-06BF38BB65E4_15A42307-7EED-4D6B-A1CD-508BADBF2F24
We went ahead and launched the app and it all worked as expected.
So what did we learn? The /appvve switch will not be added unless a restart of the client takes place prior to publishing the app.
There is not much information on this setting other than the description in the APP-V 5.0 Client settings (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj687745.aspx) so I wanted to be sure to pass this along in case anyone else wanted to do the same thing.
Hope this is of use to all,
Philip McLoughlin | App-V Escalation Engineer
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