-Filter escaping apostrophes incorrectly

[aggie87]

I think the -Filter logic is escaping apostrophes incorrectly. I get the following error when trying to filter against the following.

$filter = "fullPath -eq ""This Folder's Name""" 
PS> Get-LMDeviceGroup -Filter $filter
Failed to execute web request(400): invalid filter!  fullPath:"This Folder"s Name"

If there is a way to get that string into a filter that would be awesome, but so far, I am not finding it. I think it converts the single apostrophe into double quotes which is mangling the search string with an extra, unbound quote.

[stevevillardi]

Thanks for the report, I will have to take a look at the best way to address. I was not aware ' was a supported character for folder names. I will probably have to use some sort of escape character to address this given single quotes are used within the existing filter format.

[aggie87]

This may be way over simplified and not taking into account other situations, but in Postman what I did to test is just put the filter in double-quotes and then the only thing I have to escape in the string are double-quotes if they exist, otherwise the single quote is just left as is.

# filter single quote example in PostMan
fullPath:"This Folder's Name"

# filter double quote example in PostMan
fullPath:"This Folder\"s Name"

both of those examples seem to apply the filter correctly and retrieve the folder named This Folder's Name and This Folder"s Name

[stevevillardi]

Yea the issue with that approach is that in the event a user wants to say use a variable like $fullPath or something in their filter logic, it would require the filter to be built with double quotes so the variable replacement happens. so essentially

$filter = "fulltPath -eq `"$fullPath`"" #User would need to know to escape the internal double quotes

$filter = 'fulltPath -eq "$fullPath"' #Works but the variable replacement would not happen and the value would be treated as the string $fullPath

So in the actual implementation in order to try and make the filters as easy as possible and support the variable replacement I took the approach of using single quotes for the internal values and just replacing them when formatting the filter so the user does not have to worry about escaping them.

$filter = "fulltPath -eq '$fullPath'" #Works without the user need to escape anything

I have to be careful not to break this existing format method since scripts and other things might depend on filter to function properly.