How do you call the App Broker Web Service through PowerShell?

[CharlesW]

Many common tasks in App Broker can be performed by calling the Web Service API’s which are available. Common tasks include creating/configuring new catalog items, submitting/canceling requests, and approving/rejecting requests which require approval. The two main SOAP Web Services in App Broker are as follows:

http://[AppPortalServer]/ESD/API.asmx

http://[AppPortalServer]/ESD/ws/integration.asmx

Hitting either of these pages in a browser will show the API calls which are available, and also the input parameters for each.

While there are a number of ways to invoke the App Broker API calls, perhaps the most common is through the use of a PowerShell script. Fortunately, PowerShell makes this easy. The following is a very basic example of using PowerShell to create a new request for a catalog item:

$catalogID = 12
$targetDevice = "MyMachineName"
$targetUser = "MyDomain\MyUserName"
$requester = "MyDomain\MyRequesterName"
$useApproval = $false
$sendEmail = $false
$uri = "http://sup-apfnmp-cw/esd/api.asmx"  #Change to reflect App Broker server name.

$WebService = New-WebServiceProxy -Uri $uri -UseDefaultCredential
$requestID = $WebService.createRequest($catalogID, $targetDevice, $requester, $targetUser, $useApproval, $sendEmail, @())
echo $requestID 

Note that in the above case, the switch -UseDefaultCredential indicates that the credentials for the user invoking the PowerShell script will be used to connect to the Web Service. If it is desirable to use a different account to connect to the Web Service, then the script could be modified as follows to use a specific account:

$catalogID = 12
$targetDevice = "MyMachineName"
$targetUser = "MyDomain\MyUserName"
$requester = "MyDomain\MyRequesterName"
$useApproval = $false
$sendEmail = $false
$uri = "http://sup-apfnmp-cw/esd/api.asmx"  #Change to reflect App Broker server name.

$username = "MyDomain\MyAccountName"
$password = "MyPassword" | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force
$cred = New-Object -typename System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -argumentlist $username, $password
$WebService = New-WebServiceProxy -Uri $uri -Credential $cred
$requestID = $WebService.createRequest($catalogID, $targetDevice, $requester, $targetUser, $useApproval, $sendEmail, @())
echo $requestID 

Note:  Before you can call the above Web Services, you must enable the API. This can be done by going to Settings -> Flexera Integration, and selecting "Enable App Portal API"

[jdempsey]

Or if you plan to run the script interactively and prefer to prompt for credentials for a "Run As"-like behavior instead of hard-coding alternate credentials into your script, you can leverage the Get-Credential commandlet.