Powershell vs Tidal6

Question

Hi,
I'm working on automating some excel work using powershell. Environment is TES 6.0.3 on solaris with the agent on a windows7 x64 system.
The job calls a simple one-line bat script which is "powershell -command c:\tidal\autoexcel.ps1".
The script works fine when called from a command window however when TES executes it I get a load of errors which I'm assuming are environment related. In essence it looks like excel can't find a load of embedded functions.
The sample code can be found here. Its the charting of the weather data in Excel section.
http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-tools/com-automation-of-office-applications-via-powershell/
I've tried creating an env.bat file to reproduce my command line working environment but it hasn't helped.
Any ideas anyone?
Cheers
Joe

Answer 1

We are running 5.31 but ipowershell should behave the same in 6x
Powershell tips
It can be tricky sometimes with powershell (especially gettign remote execution working) but if you are getting security issues you probably are restricted and need "signed" scripts.. Which depending on your policies may be required... but it wasn't worth the pain to our company.
check it by running a powershell command: get-executionpolicy
We set ours to unrestricted (use set-executionpolicy unrestricted)
If you are running 64 Bit you need to do for both  32 bit and 64 bit versions
if you intend to do remoting useEnable-PSRemoting and follow the prompts
Here's an example where we reach out to an application server (FTP server) and trigger it to run an FTP task for us (send a file):
Invoke-Command -computername -scriptblock {"" '-start:""' -p:SourceFileFromAPI: -waitsecs:60 -noxfers:1}
Quotes can be a real pain with how Tidal Agents interprets the string so don't get frustrated if it works via powershell command line but won't work as a job. We discovered a defect in the way tidal handled quotes with powershell and worked with Cisco to put in a fix. we run agent 3.0.2.03 (If you read the readme files you'll find there's a switch:
3.0.2.03
HOT - CSCtv19905 - Fix to BUG00620 (substituting ticks with quotes, compat with old agent) caused
     problems for some customers.
FIX - Added new tagent.ini parameter, substticks=y|n, to control.  Yes is default for compatibility
     with old agent.
Path to Agent install \Agent\bin\tagent.ini
[config]
substticks=n
[TIDAL_AGENT_1]
Other tips
We installed powershell 2.0 on source and target, you need to keep versions consistent
You can run mutiple statements in a job... reducing the number of jobs with a semicolon ; Last statement does not have a semi-colon
Use Write-Host like you would "echo" to insert comments (all are picked up in output)
Exit Codes: you can force and standardize exit codes easily by using exit(###); as one of your statements, which is a cool way to trigger multiple actions like sending different "scenario" emails based on results with just one job, etc)
You can run "agentless" with powershell. How about stopping or starting services remotely?
set-service -computerName Targetserver -name TargetServices -status Running -passthru
We also run all our file operations with powershell (it is much more flexible and reliable that other commands)
We rarely use scipts, we mostly put basic commands or create functions directly in parameters
Function copy-file-force              
{  Bunch of Commands }
copy-file-force  Param1, Param2, etc
powershell in combination with powershell makes a poweful combination for rapid job development.
We have about 4000 powershell jobs defined and active in our environment