Quest publishes a guide to ActiveRoles Server script development in the form of a CHM (Microsoft compiled HTML help file), the ActiveRoles Server SDK (Software Development Kit). It comes with the ARS installation package, or you can download it separately from here: http://communities.quest.com/docs/DOC-10017/. Make sure you get the one for your version of ARS, but even if you’re using an earlier version, I recommend also getting the 6.7 one – more PowerShell examples. Even so, get ready to comprehend some VBScript, because that’s what most of the examples are in. It is a reference, not a step-by-step tutorial, and as a newbie to ARS development, I had a hard time getting started with it.

Fortunately, Greg Montoya has distilled the bits about $Request and $DirObj, along with how they stack up to the QAD cmdlets in the article that I insist you read before you do anything to an ARS Policy Script: Working with Data Sets in ARS Policy Scripts – $Request vs. $DirObj vs. QAD Cmdlets

There’s plenty of other wonderful ARS and PowerShell stuff on his site, but this is the article I keep coming back to. Greg explains not only what the intrinsic differences are between $Request, $DirObj and what Get-QADObject (or Get-QADUser or Get-QADGroup or …) each give back to you, but he also discusses performance reasons for choosing one or the other.

“Why won’t it read that attribute? Why isn’t it changing that attribute? I said ‘$Request.edsvaMySpecialAttribute = ($Request.City + $Request.St)‘ – isn’t that clear enough?”

No, it’s not, for several reasons I’ll discuss in my next few posts covering what the beginning ARS scripter needs to know about $Request and $DirObj.