Who is this article for?

Anyone wanting to find out where on a PC the application runs from

Sometimes it is useful to find where the application executable file is located on a client PC.  This article shows how to determine the path.

1. About Vision

The application we now call Ideagen Internal Audit was initially called 'Vision', hence the program file is called vision.exe.

It is quite self-contained; all files necessary to run the program are contained within a single folder, and when run it will create a second folder in the user's profile containing settings and cached data.

The application can be distributed to clients in a variety of ways:

• Xcopy, where a folder containing a configured application is simply copied to a client PC
• via some kind of repackaging tool, for deployment of an MSI via Group Policy or similar
• via ClickOnce, Microsoft's technology for low-impact 'per user' distribution of applications

ClickOnce is the most commonly used mechanism for deployment, with a small number of organisations preferring to repackage the application and distribute via MSI.

With ClickOnce, the user clicks on a hyperlink to a file called vision.application on their IIS server, and their browser downloads all of the application files.  The files are then stored within the users profile, at a path like:

   %localappdata%\Apps\2.0\[random folder name]\[random folder name]\[random folder name]\Vision.exe

The use of random folder names means that ClickOnce applications never try to overwrite each other, but means that the path to vision.exe on each user's PC will be different.  The path is different for each user.

Where an MSI is used, the application is likely to end up somewhere predictable within C:\Program Files (x86).

2. Locating the application on a PC

Do the following:

• Run the application
• Open Task Manager
• Task Manger will open on the Processes tab.  You can either:
  • Find Pentana.Tng.UI.Smart (32 bit) in the list
  • Or, click on the Details tab and then find Vision.exe in that list
• Highlight the item
• Right click
• Click Open File Location

This will launch File Explorer at the path containing the application files.  It will be apparent from the address in the address bar whether ClickOnce was used for deployment.

3. Local settings

When first run, the application will create a new folder at %localappdata%\Vision.  This folder will be named after the application title, so if the title is 'Pentana - PRD' then the path will be %localappdata%\Vision\Pentana - PRD:

This folder contains:

• User settings.
• Cached data.
• Checked out data (offline audits, reserved files).
• Log files.