Why is manipulating objects containing the character ':' in their names causing an error?
Why is manipulating objects containing the character ':' in their names causing an error?
Question: Why is manipulating objects containing the character ':' in their names causing an error message? Retrieving such objects results in an error message, too.
Answer: In general object names are relative or absolute paths in the context of the PowerShell Extensions for Ivanti DSM. And as such object names are treated by the PowerShell, i.e. PowerShell tries to split the path into its path elements and tries to normalize the path.
Similar to paths in filesystems, the path in the context of the PowerShell might be containing a drive, that is divided with the character ':' from the other path elements. As a conclusion PowerShell splits an object name like 'My:Computer' into a drive named 'My' and an object named 'Computer'. In most cases neither the drive nor the object exists, so PowerShell throws an error message.
To work around this problem, object names can be specified with an absolute path. In the above example the absolute path might be something like 'emdb:/rootDSE/New Users & Computers/My:Computer'. A better approach is to avoid ':' and other separator characters at all.