Exchange Online - Get-UserPhoto - how to catch non terminating error?

Question

I\'m trying to export a list of all users with no photo from our Exchange Online account using powershell. I cannot get it to work and have tried various methods.

G

Answer 1

PowerShell's error handling is notoriously tricky, especially so with cmdlets that use implicit remoting via a locally generated proxy script module.

The following idiom provides a workaround based on temporarily setting $ErrorActionPreference to Stop globally (of course, you may move the code for restoring the previous value outside the foreach loop), which ensures that even functions from different modules see it:

try {

  # Temporarily set $ErrorActionPreference to 'Stop' *globally*
  $prevErrorActionPreference = $global:ErrorActionPreference
  $global:ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop'

  $user | get-userphoto

} catch {

    Write-Host "ERROR: $_"
    $email= $user.userprincipalname
    $name = $user.DisplayName
    $office = $user.office
    write-host "User photo not found...adding to list : $name, $email, $office" 
    $resultslist += $user

} finally {  

  # Restore the previous global $ErrorActionPreference value
  $global:ErrorActionPreference = $prevErrorActionPreference

}

As for why this is necessary:

• Functions defined in modules do not see the caller's preference variables - unlike cmdlets, which do.

• The only outside scope that functions in modules see is the global scope.

For more information on this fundamental problem, see this GitHub issue.