Objects Available to the Scripting Agent

The Scripting Agent uses $ProvisioningHandler and $readOnlyIConfigurable to represent objects available during an action. I could not find any documentation on these objects and did some experimentation. The following is my results:

• The variable $ProvisioningHandler contains information about the cmdlet being executed. This includes  the name of the cmdlet, parameters for the cmdlet, and the user that ran the cmdlet.
• The name of the cmdlet is stored in $provisioningHandler.TaskName
• The user running the cmdlet is stored in $provisioningHandler.UserScope.UserID
• The parameters passed to the cmdlet are stored in $provisioningHandler.UserSpecifiedParameters[“PName”] where PName is the name of the parameter that was passed. For example, Identity and Alias are common parameter names that would be used in place of PName.
• The variable $readOnlyIConfigurable contains the properties of the object being acted upon. For example, when using the Set-Mailbox cmdlet, $readOnlyIConfigurable contains the object for the mailbox being modified. The values listed are those about to be applied, not the current values of the object.
• The content of these variables can change depending on the ApiCall being used. For example, when using the Validate ApiCall the $readOnlyIConfigurable variable is populated but when using the OnComplete ApiCall the $readOnlyIConfigurable variable is empty. I’ve not tested all of the possible permutations.

The following example of ScriptingAgentConfig.xml shows how you can check the data available to you for various cmdlets:

As far as I can tell, it is not possible to have actions of the Scripting Agent displayed on the screen. However, you can have it dump to text file as shown in the example. I also attempted to get more information about the objects by using Get-Member, but no information was returned. You can modify this example to see what information is available for each of ApiCall options and different cmdlets. Each time you run it, any previous text files are overwritten.