As promised at today’s UK VMUG, here is a collection of tools that improve my PowerShell development workflow.

A question that I frequently see popping up is “How can I reset the password of local user in vRA?”. A while back I blogged about how to achive this with PowervRA and Set-vRAUserPrincipal. However that might not be applicable to every situation.

An alternative solution could be to use a vRO workflow. The workflow could then be presented as an XaaS blueprint and published to the catalog, enabling administrators to reset passwords via the UI.

If you don’t have access to Active Directory via the vRO plugin retrieving information about a certain user can be tricky. Here is a quick example showing how to retrieve an email address from a vRA user principal with vRO. Obviously assuming that you have chosen to sync the attribute in your directory configuration.

Recently I’ve found myself doing a lot of API queries with PowerShell. I often have a URI with a lot of query parameters and escaping them manually can be cumbersome and time-consuming.

To make life easier, I have started to use [uri]::EscapeUriString(*string stringToEscape*). It takes one parameter, which is the string to escape. Here is an example to illustrate its usage:

To reverse an escaped string you can use [uri]::UnescapeDataString(*string stringToUnescape*).

Update - 05/04/2017

An was raised on one of my community projects recently. A contributor pointed out that one of our functions did not work when you chose to filter by name and the string passed to the Name parameter contained an ampersand (&).

Get-vRABusinessGroup -Name "Hello & Hello"

The REST API query was using a $filter parameter to return results where the name property was equal to the string passed to the Name parameter of the function. For example:

$URI = "/identity/api/tenants/$($TenantId)/subtenants?`$filter=name%20eq%20'Hello & Hello'"

In this case you should use [uri]::EscapeDataString(string stringToEscape). This method will also escape special characters within a string. So & becomes %26 and allows the request to succeed.

PowervRO aims to simplify interacting with vRO from the command line by providing a library of functions to help you do things like execute workflows and actions or import resources.

Release 1.0.0 includes 59 functions covering a number of services exposed by the API. Currently we support:

• Actions-service
• Category-service
• Packages-service
• Plugin-service
• Resource-service
• Service-descriptor-service
• User-service
• Workflow-run-service
• Workflow-service

If you would like to see support for something that isn’t listed above let us know over at Github or fork us and submit your own functions.