MSP Interface Patch Level - Determining which patch or version is Installed

Products

• Clarity PPM On Premise
• Clarity PPM SaaS

Issue/Introduction

The only version information for the MSP Interface available is that which is provided in the Programs and Features page of the Window Control Panel. When the Microsoft Project Interface is installed, you can see the version of the interface installed in the version column of the Programs and Features page in Windows. You can navigate here by going to Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Programs and Features.

The version indicated here is the base version of the Clarity environment where you had downloaded the interface from. In the above example, the interface was downloaded from a version of Clarity which has a base version of 15.1.

However, this doesn't provide any information on whether or not the the interface was downloaded from a patched version of 15.1 (i.e. 15.1 Patch 2, for example). The only information we can see in the above is that the version of Clarity where the interface was downloaded from was at least 15.1 base.

Environment

All supported PAS releases.

Resolution

There is no way of programmatically determining the patch level of the Clarity Microsoft Project Interface that is installed on a machine. The one option to estimate which patch is installed is by following the steps below. This may be especially helpful if you are wanting to compare one workstation versus another to see if they are on the same patch level.

         1. To estimate which patch level that an installation of the Microsoft Project Interface is on, look into the following directory 

C:\Program Files (x86)\CA\PPM\CA PPM MSPInterface\Bin.
 

This may vary depending on the bit-level of the Microsoft Project Interface that was installed (i.e., it may be located in the 'Program Files' sub-directory and not the 'Program Files (x86)' if it was 64-bit), and might be a different root location if this had been customized during the installation. 

 

2. In that directory, depending on the version of the interface that had been installed (i.e. new or legacy driver), locate the corresponding below file  
 

• • caMspXml.dll (for the new driver)                                                                                                                                                                                 
  • MSPapi.dll (for the legacy version)

         3. Take note of the date listed in the 'Date Modified' field of your given file. This date can be used to indicate which patch level of the interface is installed

For example, for a Clarity 15.1 Patch 10 installation of the Microsoft Project Interface - New driver, the caMspXml.dll file has a 'Date Modified' value of 4/3/2018.

 

4. Look at the 'CA PPM Cumulative Patch Summary' page for your base version of Clarity in Techdocs. The one in the link provided points to that version of the page for Clarity 15.1.

 

5. Look for the patch that has a release date closest to the date you took note of from earlier.
 

For our example, the patch for 15.1 that has a release date closest to 4/3/2018 is 15.1 Patch 10, which was released on 4/11/2018Using the steps above, you can estimate the patch level of an installation of the Microsoft Project Interface. In our example that you followed along with, the interface had been downloaded from PPM 15.1 Patch 10.