Createfile failed after writing 156 lines

Content Authoring
1

Hello, I am just testing this function like this
createfile until __endoffile
…few hundred lines…

But then I see that it failed! 156 lines have “completed” and then 157th says failed!
Is this function limited to only write some amount of data or what is this?

2

I have createfile commands running beyond 156 lines. My largest right now is 865 lines and it works like a champ. You should take a look at the client logs on the machine you are running the action against to get more details of what failed. Feel free to post what you find here.

3

If there is an error anywhere inside the createfile (like a relevance statement in error), the error message always shows up on the last line in the console log.

You might get more detail from the client log instead.

4

Excuse me but I don’t understand what you mean by error inside the createfile. How can this function care about what is it writing to a file??

5

logfile on client:
Command failed (Substitution failed while writing file) createfile until __endoffile (action:151248)

6

If the content contains { }, that is taken to be a Relevance Substitution. If there is an error in the relevance (or it’s not Relevance at all) it yields a relevance Substitution error.

If it’s not Relevance, you d to escape the brackets by changing ,{ to {{

7

it’s a powershell code so yes. I see it failed on the line containing {
Don’t you think it would be great if this behavior was actually documented here? :slight_smile: I had no idea about this
https://developer.bigfix.com/action-script/reference/file/createfile-until.html

8

A quick search of this forum finds:

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9

It’s a good point. We should update the ‘createfile’ documentation to include a note warning about the potential need to escape curly braces, and provide an example as well.

10

Agreed. There is example usage at https://developer.bigfix.com/action-script/guide/substitution.html for more detail on the usage; it would be useful to link this from the createfile and appendfile documentation.

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11

if I had any idea something might need escaping, I would search for it yes :smiley:
thanks for updating it Aram

12

Thanks for mentioning this. I ran into the exact same issue.

Can I just escape all left and right curly braces to be safe? I have a Powershell script where I’m using createfile and there are a ton of both left and right curly brackets, sometimes embedded multiple levels. I tried escaping all left curly brackets but that didn’t solve the issue.

I wish there was a way to escape an entire line so I don’t have to worry about it at all?

13

If there are no relevance substitutions intended, escape all the opens as {{ and none of the closes (they remain } ).

I usually do a find/replace all in notepad or notepad++ before pasting it into ActionScript.

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14

Thanks, Jason! I’ll do that.

I realized my own issue: I didn’t sync components in my baseline. When I escaped all of the left curly brackets in my task, the baseline doesn’t use the new version so that’s why my second attempt failed. I’m still a Bigfix newbie. :sweat_smile:

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15

Thank you for this! I only wasted a day!

16

Mixing toolsets and environments? It’s character escaping all the way down.

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