Unable to commit changes to publishing pages using powershell

Question

First off let me start by saying this is the first time I have posted a question here, I often visit this website and other StackExchange/Overflow sites for assistance on various projects and assignments. Hopefully I have given enough detail below for someone to help me out however please let me know if you need anything else.

I am trying to update a large number (about 6500) of publishing pages across 20-30 webs within an application that we have. I have copied existing code that I have used many times before which successfully edits pages, the only difference is that this time round I am getting the content from the file system rather than getting it from SharePoint, modifying it directly within PowerShell and putting it back in.

The changes to the PublishingPageContent field are not getting updated and revert back to it's previous value before getting checked back in and published.

ForEach ($Item in $ListItems)
{
    $ItemPath = $PageDirectory + $SubWebUrl2 + "/" + $Item.Url
    $ItemPath = $ItemPath -replace "/","\"

    $ItemFile = $Item.File

    if($ItemFile.CheckOutStatus -ne "None")
    {
        Write-Host "First Checkin.. " -NoNewLine
    $ItemFile.CheckIn("Automatic CheckIn. (Administrator)")
    }

    Write-Host "Checkout.. " -NoNewLine
    $ItemFile.CheckOut()

    Write-Host "Updating page.. " -NoNewLine
    $ItemFile.Properties.PublishingPageContent = Get-Content $ItemPath | Out-String
    $ItemFile.Update()

    Write-Host "Second Checkin.. " -NoNewLine
    $ItemFile.CheckIn("Automatic CheckIn. (Administrator)")
}

And this is the output of a single item

Checkout.. Updating page.. Update : Exception calling "Update" with "0" argument(s): "Only String, INT, and DateTime datatypes can be used as the value in Properties."
At C:\Workspace\Step4ImportPages.ps1:48 char:19
  +         $ItemFile.Update <<<< ()
  + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodInvocationException
  + FullyQualifiedErrorId : DotNetMethodException
Second Checkin.. Publishing.. Approving.. PS C:\Workspace>

Unfortunately I am unable to provide a complete example of the content being imported, however I can say that it is just plain HTML being stored in ASPX files purely for convenience so that the file system structure replicates what is in SharePoint. The Get-Content $ItemPath command is successfully getting the HTML, here is a snippet

<H3>&nbsp;</H3><A name=LPTOC1></A>
<H3 class=Level2>
<DIV style="TEXT-ALIGN: right"><A name=JD_MSI247-ATTACHMENT1></A><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">ATTACHMENT 1</SPAN></DIV></H3>
<P>&nbsp;</P>

Answer 1

Ok I found the solution.

My issue was that the Get-Content cmdlet was creating an array of strings for each line. Advice I found on the internet suggested that piping the output of Get-Content to Out-String would consolidate this into a single string. Out-String does not actually perform this behaviour and as such the datatype of String[] was not being accepted even though I assumed (based on the advice) that it would have been consolidated to just String.

As I am using SharePoint 2010 which requires the use of PowerShell 2.0, I was also unable to utilise the Get-Content parameter -Raw which was introduced in PowerShell 3.0. To get around this I ended up having to strongly typecast the property to get it to work.

Broken Line:

$ItemFile.Properties.PublishingPageContent = Get-Content $ItemPath | Out-String

Solution (strongly typecasted):

[string]$ItemFile.Properties.PublishingPageContent = Get-Content $ItemPath

Answer 2

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.splistitem.aspx

as per this above link, you can set any property on SPListItem and data types are mentioned which are supported. Try it yourself and post it here if you still get any issue, below is an example you can try (suppose your SPListItem object is oItem) both ways

oItem["ProductAmount"] =1200;

OR

oItem["ProductAmount"] ="1200";

When we work on publishing pages, we have to take care of update commands in power shell.

if($Item.Exists -ne $false) { #Checkout the page $Item.CheckOut() #Update Item Property $Item["Title"] = "Title Updated"; #Check in and Publish the page $Item.CheckIn("Property Updated") $Item.Publish("Property Updated") } $spWeb.Update(); #Dispose SPWeb object $spWeb.Dispose();

---