Monday, October 10, 2016

Using PowerShell to list the 10 most recent KBs installed in AX2012 R3

I was asked to get an overview of the most recent KBs installed on an AX2012 R3 environment.
One way to do this is using PowerShell.
We know each KB is deployed as a single model, and we know each model installed will have a unique ID. This ID is incremented automatically by the system, so why not just sort on it, in a descending fashion.

Look at the following PowerShell command:

axmodel | 
where {$_.Name -match 'KB'} | 
sort modelid -Descending | 
select modelid, displayname, version, description, details -first 10 | 
out-gridview

I assume the default environment picked up by the command "axmodel" (alias for Get-AXModel) is the one we want to query. You can put in a "-Verbose" after the command if you'd like to see some verbose information about what ModelStore database the command operates on.

I then add a filter on the list, making sure I only get models having a match on "KB" in the Name property. I could also have looked for the word "hotfix" in the Description property. The string is not case sensitive.

I then pipe the result to a sorting where I want the list sorted descending on the ModelId.

I select out only some of the columns, and I also pick out the first 10 of the result.

Finally I send the result to the GridView Window, just because I like to see the result in a nice window (which allow for resizing, column resizing, filtering, etc).

Notice also that I can have this entire command on multiple lines, and the trick is that PowerShell will allow this when you use Pipe (|) like I am doing above. Otherwise, a line-break is interpreted as execution of a command, so be aware of that when running a "multi-line" PowerShell command.

You can also use the example above to do other things, like looking for specific KBs and check if they are already installed.

Enjoy!

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