PowerShell for SCSM: Working with History Tab Information
A question came up in the forums about assigning an Service Request (SR) to the user that had put the SR On Hold. The solution that I thought of involved getting the history on the SR and finding the username of the analyst that put the SR On Hold.
This blog outlines some general examples of PowerShell code that will help when dealing with History tab information and includes the full script example of assigning the SR to the analyst that put the SR On Hold.
Define Classes and Relationships
First define any relationships and Classes that you might need. I am using the example from the forum post, so will use Service Request. You should be able to modify the examples below for other work items.
Import-Module SMLets -Force
$WorkItemID = "SR132"
$WorkItemClass = Get-SCSMClass System.WorkItem.ServiceRequest$
$WorkItemObject = Get-SCSMObject -Class $WorkItemClass -Filter "Id -eq $WorkItemID "
Get the History Information
Now we can get the History tab information from the SR object:
$History = Get-SCSMObjectHistory -Object $WorkItemObject
This will give us the following:
You can see that each update has a time stamp and User. Each update contains a list of the values that have been made or updated.
Properties on History
If we look at the Properties on $History we can see that we are probably interested in the $History.History property.
$History | Get-Member
Changes on the History Tab
We can now loop thorough the changes that were made looking at the $History.History property.
foreach ($Change in $History.History ) { Write-Host $Change |FL }
Not as useful as you would expect.
Properties on each Change on the History Tab
So let's look at the properties on each Change in the above loop.
$Change | Get-Member
And we are most interested in the contents of the $Change.Changes list property.
Loop to get each Value update
So we will loop through each update ($Change.Changes property) made in each of the History changes:
foreach ($Change in $History.History ) { foreach ($Update in $Change.Changes ) { { Write-host "Update entered by $($Change.Username) " $Update | FL } }
Now we can see what values have changed, both the old and new values, who made the change and what type of change it was. This is what we wanted!
From this point you can collect the data and use it as required.
Full Script
In the Forum example and the Full Script, I added in the Enums for SR In Progress and SR On Hold, added the User class and Assigned To relationship references.
By looping through the changes looking at the Old Value enum for In Progress and New Value enum for On Hold, I was then get the user that made the change and able to set the Assigned to user on the SR to the last analyst to put the SR on Hold.
Download Script: PlaceSRonHold.zip
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