Recover Citrix deleted application

Question

Due to an error some of the Published applications in our farm (Citrix 4.5) were deleted. As far as we have the datastore in Oracle probably restoring our last backup before the accidental deletion will solve the problem.

But before performin this action (recover the database used for farm datastore) I've take a look to the database and I realized there is a table called DELETETRACKER which seems to hold the already deleted applications in Citrix.

On this table there is a field called smallentry which seems to hold the application configuration. I wonder if there is a way to see this field on a human readable way so we can recover the information of those deleted applications and publish them again manually.

Answer 1

Try DSView.exe
There is a tool for looking inside the XenApp Data Store. It is called "DSView.exe". I think this is your best bet. Unfortunately I can't give any better pointers on where exactly to look inside the DS.

Here's a Citrix Support article that has screenshots and general info on DSView.exe:
CTX127599 - How to Detect if Shadowing was Enabled During Installation (Archived here.)

(There is also a dedicated article on DSView.exe, but it's not that useful:
CTX106232 - DSView (Archived here.))

Edit: "DeleteTracker" is a dead end
I think the "DeleteTracker" entry won't help. From what I can tell, it's just a reference to an object. And not the object itself.

CTX116774 - Tables Within the XenApp IMA Data Store (Archived here.)

DeleteTracker

• The DeleteTracker table is only present in SQL Server, SQL Express, and Oracle databases. It is used for efficient synchronization of the data in the IMA data store with the Local Host Cache on a server in the farm.
• This table only contains the metadata for the objects that have been deleted from the KeyTable. It is used to quickly determine which objects have been deleted from the IMA data store and hence can be deleted from the Local Host Cache as well.

Some more background info on the general structure of the DS here:
Brian Madden, Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 Advanced Technical Design Guide, The IMA Data Store (Archived here.)