Use selection profiles to create groups of Deployment Workbench items, such as operating systems, device drivers, or applications. Use the selection profiles to specify device drivers, define content to include in a linked deployment share, define the content to include for media deployments, and other tasks.

The relationship between items and folders in a selection profile is stored in the following files in the deployment_share\Control folder (where deployment_share is the location of the deployment share):

·     itemGroups.xml. The contents of this file are similar to how groups were stored in MDT 2008 Update 1. There is a separate file for each type of item, including:

·     ApplicationGroups.xml

·     DriverGroups.xml

·     LinkedDeploymentShareGroups.xml

·     MediaGroups.xml

·     OperatingSystemGroups.xml

·     PackageGroups.xml

·     SelectionProfileGroups.xml

·     TaskSequenceGroups.xml

For example, consider a selection profile for device drivers called WinPEAndFullOS that are stored in a folder created immediately beneath the Out-of-Box Drivers node. The following code is an excerpt from the DriverGroups.xml file generated when you created the selection profile:

<groups>

…

 <group_quid="{e5143c1c-24e4-466d-9b56-b0db693c8619}" enable="True">

   <Name>WinPEAndFullOS</Name>

…

   <Member>{1eca45a5-d7ef-475a-bb0d-7f7747f16b3a}</Member>

·     SelectionProfiles.xml. This file contains the definitions for all the selection profiles defined for the deployment share. The following code is an excerpt from the SelectionProfile.xml file generated when you created the WinPEAndFullOS selection profile:

  <selectionProfile quid="{46a3e6a2-694c-4c2f-afd8-a2986e6e252e}" enable="True">

    <Name>Drivers Safe For WinPE</Name>

    <Comments>Include Driver packages safe for WinPE.</Comments>

    <ReadOnly>True</ReadOnly>

    <Definition>&lt;SelectionProfile&gt;&lt;Include path="Out-of-Box Drivers\WinPEAndFullOS" /&gt;&lt;Include path="Out-of-Box Drivers\WinPEOnly" /&gt;&lt;/SelectionProfile&gt;</Definition>

  </selectionProfile>

By default, if you do not specify a selection profile or group in the CustomSettings.ini file or in the MDT DB, LTI uses all items. If you specify both selection profiles and groups in the CustomSettings.ini file or the MDT DB, LTI uses all the items from both the selection profile and the group.

For example, if you specify a selection profile and use the default group (which includes all items), the end result is that LTI uses all items, because the default group includes all items, regardless of what you specify in the selection profile. To restrict the items to a selection profile, specify a group that contains no items (that is, is empty). The reverse is true if you want to use a group.

Because of the introduction of folders in MDT, groups include all folders and subfolders by default. You can override this behavior using the SkipGroupSubFolders property. For more information on this property, see the corresponding section in the MDT document Toolkit Reference.

In most instances, you can use selection profiles and groups to perform most deployments. However, the following properties are available for more advanced scenarios—such as if you want to exclude a parent folder but include a child folder:

·     CustomDriverSelectionProfile

·     CustomPackageSelectionProfile

·     CustomWizardSelectionProfile

For more information on these properties, see the corresponding sections in the MDT document Toolkit Reference.

Related Topics

Manage Selection Profiles