Returning Complex Variables from PowerShell to CAPA

As a quick follow up to my post yesterday CAPA 4.3.2 - Passing complex variables to PowerShell scripts!, I thought I'd show one of the ways that I'm now using to get complex data out of PowerShell and back into CAPA.

In the several years I have been using CAPA, I have come up with about a half-dozen different ways to pass data back from PowerShell to CAPA.  But I think this is the one that I have so far found to be one of the quickest and easiest to use.

The whole process involves 4 pretty basic steps:

1. Creating a PowerShell Object to hold your results
2. Converting the PowerShell Object to JSON
3. Writing the JSON text to the ScriptOutput
4. Once back in CAPA, parsing that JSON text directly into a ValueMap.

I'll attach the PowerShell and JavaScript code at the bottom, so feel free to skip ahead if you are the DIY kind of person.

The sample PowerShell code I have attached is a simple example to show how to generate the output.

This example will either return a failure status (if the drive doesn't exist) with a simple error message like this:

{
"status": "failure",
"message": "Cannot find drive. A drive with the name ZZ does not exist."
}

Or a status of success, with a complex result like this:

{
"status": "success",
"result": [
       {
         "Name": "adb",
         "Parent": "",
         "Exists": true,
         "Root": "C:\\",
         "FullName": "C:\\adb",

         ....

      }
   ]

}

This output is then easily converted to a ValueMap via convertJson() and you end up with something that looks like this:

Hopefully this helps someone out,

Ian

### START OF POWERSHELL SAMPLE SCRIPT ###

try
{
<# Do something here #>
#$x = Get-ChildItem C:\ -ErrorAction Stop  #Should exit success

$x = Get-ChildItem ZZ:\ -ErrorAction Stop  #Should exit failure
$Result_Value = New-Object PSObject
$Result_Value | add-member Noteproperty status "success"
$Result_Value | add-member Noteproperty result $x
$output = $Result_Value | ConvertTo-Json
Write-Host $output
Exit 0
}
catch
{
$Result_Value = New-Object PSObject
$Result_Value | add-member Noteproperty status "failure"
$Result_Value | add-member Noteproperty message $_.Exception.Message.tostring()
$output = $Result_Value | ConvertTo-Json
Write-Host $output
Exit 1
}

### END OF POWERSHELL SAMPLE SCRIPT ###

//START OF CAPA POST-EXCEUTION CODE SAMPLE SCRIPT
try
{
var process_output = newValueMap();
process_output = convertJson(Process[OpName].scriptOutput);

if(process_output.status != "success")
{
setOperatorStatus("Failure",-1,process_output.status.toString());
}
Process[OpName].process_output = process_output;
Process.results = process_output.result;
}
catch(x)
{
setOperatorStatus("Failure",-1,x.toString());
}
//END OF CAPA POST-EXCEUTION CODE SAMPLE SCRIPT