App-V 5: Capturing Data Source Configuration

You may have noticed that in previously releases of Softgrid and App-V, it was recommended as a best practice to manually create a dummy (I hate that word – I prefer “artificial”) ODBC data source (DSN) connection on the sequencing prior to sequencing anything that interacts with ADO/ODBC. The reason for this has to do with how these settings get captured during the sequencing process and how default registry opacity is handled. If the settings for ODBC are empty than any settings that are captured during the sequencing will be reconciled as “Override” since there will be no existing ODBC registry keys on the sequencer.

The problem this creates is the override settings will prevent the virtual application from seeing any existing ODBC settings that may exist on the client workstation. Given that the application may need to interface with a database client or middleware that needs these settings, this could be problematic. If you create a dummy (as it has been called) ODBC connection in advance, then only the settings for the connection parameters (DSN) captured during sequencing will be collected and the opacity will be set to “Merge.”

With the advent of the 4.6 SP1, many sequencing best practices were implemented into the workflow of the sequencer software. Among them was this very creation of an artificial DSN. As a result, people stopped having to worry about it. Well . . .

It is time to start doing this again. With the 5.0 Sequencer (including the latest SP2 release) you will need to create an artificial ODBC connection in advance of sequencing. Otherwise, you will still run into registry opacity issues with ODBC settings that are captured during sequencing. In most cases, virtual machines are used so I would simply add this to the default configuration of your base sequencing machine.