How to quickly repair published App-V packages

Ryan Cobb | Senior Premier Field Engineer

Hi all, Ryan Cobb here with a little insight on repairing App-V packages. A question I’ve received more than a couple times from App-V administrators is “What’s the easiest way to retrieve a shortcut that was accidently deleted by a user?”

The background is usually a situation where the administrator deploys a virtual application to an end user and the app is added and the extensions are published. Everything works fine, but then the user accidently deletes a shortcut from the published application and calls the help desk looking for support.

The help desk then instructs the user to open the App-V Client Console, select the Virtual Apps tab, Select the Package and click the Repair button.  This resets the extensions to their original published locations.  One other task this command performs is that it cleans the user state of this package for this user.  There’s a lot more information on what user state is all about here and Thamim explains it perfectly!  While this process will work, the end result is that when using the repair option from within the console the extensions and the user state are reset to the ‘gold image’ of the package. This means that if the user customized their application then those customizations are reset as well.

So what if you wanted a better way? Enter PowerShell. If the admin simply wants to repair the applications extensions they can execute the following command:

Get-AppVClientPackage *Office* | Repair-AppVClientPackage –Extensions

Note the use of wildcards.  This will simply ‘republish’ the shortcuts and not reset the user’s state.

On the flip side, if all you wanted to repair was the user state, then simply remove the –Extensions switch and add –UserState instead!

Hope this helps!

Ryan Cobb | Senior Premier Field Engineer | Microsoft

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