The following sections explain the different issues with rebuilding Desktop Application Distributions, including how to trigger a rebuild:
All attributes contained in a golden Application object, not just the modified attributes, are updated in the distributed Application objects when a Distribution is rebuilt, sent, and extracted. This means that if you make a change to an attribute in a distributed Application object, such as a source path, that source path is overwritten by the source path data in the golden Application object. In other words, all distributed Application objects are kept in sync with their golden Application object. Exceptions to this are described in Maintaining a Golden Application’s Attributes.
A rebuilt Desktop Application Distribution includes all file changes made after the last time the Distribution was built.
You can control when a Distribution is rebuilt by whether you select the Rebuild Only If Any Application Number Changes check box in the Desktop Application Distribution Wizard:
This feature is useful for withholding modifications to a golden Application object until you are ready to release them.
The Distribution is rebuilt according to its established Build schedule, but only after you have manually incremented the Version Number field in the golden Application object, or its dependent application, and the Distributor has read eDirectory to discover the Version Number field change.
If there are multiple applications in a Distribution, a version number change in only one of them triggers a rebuild of the Distribution for all of them.
The Version Number field is on the Distribution Options > Options tab of the Application object’s properties.
Regardless of the status of this check box, it is rebuilt according to its Build schedule if applications are added to or removed from the Distribution.
If you do not select this option (it is unchecked by default), the Distribution is rebuilt according to its established Build schedule. In this case, there can be two scenarios:
When you modify a Distribution object or one of its golden Application objects, its internal revision number is automatically changed, which triggers a rebuild of the Distribution according to its established Build schedule.
Modifications include adding or removing applications from the Distribution. However, if you simply update, add, or remove application files in the Distributor server’s file system, this does not alter the internal revision number of the Desktop Application Distribution object. The ZENworks file synchronization feature does not apply to the files in Application objects. Therefore, no rebuild is triggered.
If you add, remove, or update any files belonging to a golden Application object, those changes are included when the next rebuild is triggered.
Removing a distributed Application object causes a backlink to the golden Application object to change without any other changes being made to the object. This causes the internal revision number to change on the golden Application object, which triggers a rebuild of its Distribution according to the established Build schedule.