Feature Request: New Built-In Conditional Items based on Contents of ApplicationsInventory.plist about munki HOT 11 CLOSED

It's an interesting idea. I'd like to see someone build a POC using admin-provided conditions (maybe using munki-facts) to test out the concept and get a feel for performance, overhead, etc.

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I've been using a munki-fact based on the inbuilt app_data function to retrieve the installed bundle IDs to use in conditional_items and installable_conditions. It does take a few seconds longer at the beginning of a managedsoftwareupate run, but I'm currently willing to live with that for the extra functionality.

I imagine the overhead would be less if this were a built-in conditional item and the data was written into ConditionalItems.plist at the point the app_data / saveappdata functions are called during a managedsoftwareupdate run.

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Decided to play with this today. It would be pretty easy to extend the "built-in" facts with a single "applications" array of dictionaries that contains the same info currently written to ApplicationInventory.plist. This would allow for predicates like
ANY applications.name == "Microsoft Word" which would return True if Microsoft Word was installed, or
ANY applications.bundleid BEGINSWITH "com.adobe" which would return True if any Adobe apps were installed.
You could even do
ANY applications.path == "/Applications/Firefox.app" if you only wanted to test for apps installed in /Applications, and not return True for apps that might be in a user's home dir or in /Users/Shared.
I don't see any easy way to test for a specific version of an app, or specify a predicate that matches an app if it's lower than a specific version.

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After reading up on the underdocumented SUBQUERY keyword for NSPredicate, I have a predicate that returns True if Microsoft Word, version "16.82" is installed:
SUBQUERY(applications, $a, $a.bundleid == "com.microsoft.Word" AND $a.version == "16.82").@count > 0

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One could also do something like:
SUBQUERY(applications, $a, $a.bundleid == "com.microsoft.Word" AND $a.version BEGINSWITH "16.").@count > 0
to determine if Microsoft Word with a "major version" of "16" was installed.

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See https://funwithobjc.tumblr.com/post/2726166818/what-the-heck-is-subquery

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See also https://github.com/munki/munki/wiki/_Preview-of-Conditional-Application-Data

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There's really nothing here that couldn't have been done with a custom "fact" script, but having it built in is a little more efficient and makes if far more likely Munki admins will actually use it.

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Munki 6.5 has been released and contains an implementation of the requested feature here.

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