The option to change the vRO workflow associated with an XaaS Blueprint isn’t available through the UI. However, it is available via the vRA Plugin for vRO.

Obviously the more complex your workflow presentation the less viable this becomes but for simple presentations or workflows that only rely on context parameters it could be a neat solution.

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.