Forcing "" around displaynames and email addresses with & in, or just getting a detailed error message.

Question

Hi, I need to create a number of mail user accounts via Adaxes and a lot of these accounts have & in the displayname/email address etc (I know, I know :)).

The new-mailuser command keeps failing as I suspect I am missing the "" around the items that contain an &. I have tried everything I can think of including "'$name'", ""$Name"" etc etc and I can't seem to get the custom command to add the "" around it.

Two questions really, how can I force the "" around the parameter with an & in or how to I get detailed error messages of why the command failed so I can troubleshoot it better. I have tried $context.logmessage($_.Exception.Message)

Thanks

Answer 1

Hello,

how can I force the "" around the parameter with an & in

All you need to do is to specify the variable value in double quotes. For example, if you specify the value explicitly, it should look like this:

$name = "John & Doe"
$address = "j&d@domain.com"
New-MailUser -Name $name -ExternalEmailAddress $address

how to I get detailed error messages of why the command failed so I can troubleshoot it better.

To catch the exception returned by a cmdlet, use a try/catch block. Also, you need to specify the Stop value in the ErrorAction parameter of the cmdlet. The whole approach should look like this:

try
{
    New-MailUser -Name $name -ExternalEmailAddress $address -ErrorAction Stop
}
catch
{
    $Context.LogMessage("The following error occurred: " + $_Exception.Message, "Warning")
}

Comments

Thanks, this has really helped.