Automic Workload Automation

Has anyone dealt with an & in a Promptset Value?

I was able to get the & to pass all the way to the Agent by putting three ampersands (&) in the Promptset Variable to escape it. The first escapes for the Promptset, so that when the job executes it gets &&, then inside the job it sends just a single & to the Agent for execution.

But now what happens is that I get an Fault in Post Processing because it takes the double (&&) and seems to evaluate it to a single, where it then assumes that it is a variable that needs to be replaced.

Because Automic does NOT allow editing of Promptset Variables inside the job, it won't let me do a STR_SUB to either remove or replace the ampersands.

Any thoughts?

I ran into a similar issue with special characters in names. 

I use the CallAPI to kick off the notification for our Password resets. In the script we pass in the First Name, Last Name, email to the Notification job.
I found that if the requestor had a special character in their name, like René, the AE would interpret it as René.

Since we were using the HTML email notification, we had to pass it as the HTML code for the email to correctly display it.
The HTML code for é is é . So even adding a 2nd && so the PromptSet passed it as a literal &, the tasks within the workflow tried to evaluate it.

To get around this, before executing the CallAPI, we replaced the & with a random pattern in this case '0a0' and then in a Script object as the first task, I replaced the '0a0' with '&&' which then the jobs further down interpreted as a literal &.

:pset &fname#=str_sub(&fname#,"0a0","&&")
: p &fname#

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Technically, I could do the STR_SUB in the Pre-Process step of the job. The Problem is that the variable is a PromptSet variable which for some reason is read-only, once the job is executing. So the PSET won't work.

So I'd have to store the value in a different variable, which I was trying to avoid.

If the PromptSet is on the task, then correct, you can't use a PSET to change the value since it's evaluated at the same time as the Pre-Process tab.

In my case, the PromptSet is on the Parent workflow and passed to the tasks, which is why I am able to manipulate the variable with the Script object.

Evaluation of Variables and PromptSets gets a bit confusing....

I told the users of the Prompt Value that they can't use & due to Automic special character. That was the simplest solution.

Interesting challenge.  The problem still exists in 11.2.1.   I haven't been able to find any solutions.  The only workaround I have achieved is to expect the customer to use a substitute input character, and then run the str_substitute() function to convert the substitute character to an ampersand, which of course requires a new variable to hold the results.

According to this thread, you could work around this PromptSet problem by using the  :READ method instead of a PromptSet;
https://community.automic.com/discussion/7845/how-to-read-a-variable-with-ampersand

I've also discovered that if the customer inputs a double-ampersand, it works and resolves to a single ampersand.

 https://our-ara-domain.com:8443/ecc/#bond-p/executions/properties&&oid=617635