Documenting Your Task Sequences Automagically
Often times, after creating an MDT or SCCM task sequence, you need to document it for yourself or your customers. Usually, this involves creating a table with the groups and steps, extracting their descriptions, identifying conditions and denoting the step actions and variables and then having format it all nicely and with indents denoting hierarchy. All of this information is usually already in the XML of the task sequence and all you're really doing is formatting. You can automatically format XML documents by using an XSL transform with the right logic. In order to do this:
1. Copy the attached file at the bottom of the post to the same folder as your task sequence.
2. Open your task sequence in your favourite text editor.
3. After the first line which should look something like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?> or <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
enter the following as the second line:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="tsDocumentorv1.xsl"?>
4. Save your task sequence file and open it in Internet Explorer. Presto! The XSL takes care of formatting, indents and sizing.
Your Task Sequence should look like this:
You can even change the styles of groups and steps easily.
1. Open up the tsDocumentorv1.xsl file
2. Edit the following section:
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
TD.group { background-color:teal;color:white }
TD.step { background-color:beige }
</STYLE>
Change the colours or any other css properties you choose!
The XSL should work with task sequences created with BDD 2007, MDT 2008 and SCCM 2007.
Please try it out and post comments.
This post was contributed by Aly Shivji a consultant with Microsoft Services - U.S. East Region. Credit to Michael Murgolo for initial idea and effort.
