SAP SNC integration, Enter Powershell

For me shell programming mostly is to automate simple IT admin tasks like reorganising database tables, compact file systems etc. I’m not very good at doing the same thing twice so I tend to write ‘admin procedures’ for many small tasks. During the years I used a lot of shell scripting languages. The first I used was IBM mainframe EXEC/CLIST (Command List) and JCL (Job Control language). JCL is not normally not regarded as a shell scripting language, anyway that was many years ago both these languages were pretty primitive/crappy. In all fairness IBM has also constructed one great (shell) scripting language REXX.

When you write a shell script you often need to have a good understanding and control of the environment and context where your script runs. God interfaces to the underlying opsys and commands are essential as predefined constants of script name opsys version, current working directory etc. My ‘shell processes’ often consists of an initial part maintaining configuration parameters and another part acting upon the 'computer environment' with the help of these parameters.

Now I’m creating an interface between SAP SNC and External ERP systems, a task where a shell scripting procedure may seem an odd choice, but I got some odd requirements, the interface must work on a standard Windows desktop, very easy to distribute and handle, since the users of this interface are not expected to be IT-savvy. Anyway I thought why not give Powershell a go, and contain the entire interface in one script, for easy export/import. If you read the link above you know SAP SNC spits out a rather ugly CSV file and the receivers expects a decent structured XML file. I decided to do the file metamorphosis from CSV to XML in two steps, first transform the CSV file into a SAP SNC XML format, and then transform that XML file with a XSL script into the final XML format. It was surprisingly easy to create a draft. IT only took some hours due to some powerful functions in Powershell, e.g. a one liner to parse the complex SNC csv file:

$olArray = Get-Content ‘CSV-FILE-NAME’ | Select-Object -Skip 11 | ConvertFrom-Csv

Another very pleasant surprise was the abundance of useful information I found on the web, I could pinch a lot of code directly from blog posts. I didn't expect that, in the past I found free (as in free beer) Microsoft information rare.

It is simple to create popups for text input and file selection, which is of great value for configuration. 

But there were some nasties too, the worst is actually really bad, functions reply with all output produced e.g:

return ‘OK’

does not necessarily  only return ‘OK’ but all? output created in the function is also pushed on the ‘return stack’, this forces you to some extraordinary cleansing after the call:

$returnValues = function "$Parameter"

$OKstring = $returnValues[-1]  # pop the last value off the ‘return stack’

This is exacerbated by the fact any object missing a verb in the code is automatically transferred to standard output making it appear on the ‘return stack’, this make it hard to find all things pushed onto the return stack. I find this behavior very strange. And it took me some time to figure it out. I hope I’m wrong about this or there is a clear ‘return stack’ option like  - return -only ‘OK’

The Powershell ISE hangs every now and then when I use popups, which seems to be placed haphazardly on the screen depending on Windows versions.

All in all I find Powershell scripting a pleasant experience, a very powerful language although a bit quirky. I have only been coding for about 15 hours with no training upfront, so I might have got things wrong.

My script now takes this:

to this:

I’m happy with my script. It is an easy configurable script able to run on most Windows system, so I hope. I have written the script with Powershell versions 3 and 4 in mind, but now I have realised version 2 is still very much used, so I may have to back port my script to vs 2.