Altiris Deployment Solution Job Search Utility

One of the most frustrating problems with Deployment Server is the lack of the ability to search jobs. There are many scenarios where searching jobs is useful - here are just a few,

1. To find all those Adobe Reader jobs you've got so that you can be sure that all the vulnerable version deployments are patched
2. You've got an image sitting on your Deployment Solution express share, but don't know if its got an active job attached
3. You've moved from using DOS to Linux/WinPE for image deployment, and want to be sure that you've upgraded all the jobs which used your "Managed DOS" environment
4. You want to tidy up your PXE Configuration menu, but can't as there are jobs linking to the option you want to delete.

The tool attached to this article aims to solve these issues by providing very quickly all the jobs which satisfy your search string. Not only the job names are searched, but automation options and image file paths too.

It has been tested on Deployment Solution 6.9 SP2.

Installing the Tool

To get the search tool up and running on your server, execute the MSI attached to install. This will install the DS Job Search HTML application into "C:\Program Files\DS Job Searcher". It will activate with the hotkey CTRL-ALT-q, ALTGR + q or it is available on the Start Menu.

Running the Tool

Once the utility has started, either by pressing Ctrl+Alt+q or AltGr+q or clicking the 'DS Job Search' icon under Start / Programs, you are presented with the simple search panel.

The search text is a straight pattern match: the text entered is pattern-match against all the following:

   i) all DS job names,
   ii) all DS imaging jobs that use an image file with the pattern text in the path, and
   iii) all DS jobs that boot to automation environments where the pattern text is in the automation environment name.

In the example above the result is as follows:

No matches were found for the pattern here:

Below a more ambiguous pattern is entered, resulting in matches for 'DOS' against job names, image file names and automation environment names:

The string pattern is not case sensitive and will accept 'special' characters such as square bracket [ percent % single quote ' and backslash \. If there is any escaping of special characters required the program does this automatically. For a pattern to match it can exist anywhere in the test text.

How the tool works

The application works by connecting to the ODBC connection "Altiris eXpress Database" and executing SQL queries on the express database directly. In order to make the tool work as a standalone item, we've avoided relying on the creation of custom SQL functions. This makes the SQL is more complicated than we'd normally write, and hence the use of cursors in the code.

This utility was created by D.Collins (GUI, scripting and packaging) and I.Atkin (SQL queries). We hope you find this useful.

Darren Collins
Applications Packaging and Deployment for the ICT Support Team,
Oxford University, UK.

- 0.7.3 - Fixed error when results included a job stored at the root of the Job tree.