Vue lecture

Troubleshoot PowerShell Add-Type Load Error [Tip]

In the last couple of days I am working with a client that has a DMS solution based on SharePoint Server 2010. We inherited the solution so it has it's specifics. One of those little things (that make life exciting) is that they have fields with custom data types.

I had to do a powershell script that will edit some document metadata. I had to update standard SharePoint native data type fields, but after updating the item in powershell I lost the values of the custom data type fields. I realized that I need the custom data type loaded in the powershell session. So I started to import some DLLs, in the order that I thought it makes sense as we do not have the source code of the solutions.This was fine until I received the error below:

Add-Type : Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.

This error is completely generic and the only useful thing is that it tells us where we can find more useful information.

This simple error handling script turned out to be life saver for me as it showed exactly what the load error is and which dependent assembly I need to load first :)

The nice blue text is our LoaderExceptions property of the exception. I hope that you find it useful!

SharePoint Trenches

Get a quick report of the SharePoint Databases with PowerShell [Tip]

Here comes another useful PowerShell one-liner I often use.
It will give you a quick overview of the SharePoint databases with properties like: Name, Server(Alias), TypeName, Web application name, Web application URL, Site collection count and the Size.
The size is actually the amount of disk space required for uncompressed backup. It might look something like a script, but actually it is a long and simple one-liner. You can see it below, I have used grave-accent(`) escape characters to fit it better in the blog. You can see it in one line here. Instead of piping to Format-Table you can generate CSV by piping to Export-CSV and later work with it in Excel.

Get-SPDatabase | Select-Object Name,@{Expression={$_.Server};Label="Server"},TypeName,@{Expression=`
{$_.WebApplication.Name};Label="WebAppLication"},@{Expression={$_.WebApplication.Url};Label="WebAppLicationUrl"}`
,@{Expression={($_.WebApplication.Sites | Measure).Count};Label="SC Count"},@{Label ="Size in MB";`
 Expression ={$_.disksizerequired/1024/1024}} |  Format-Table -AutoSize