How to use GetItems in Powershell to retrieve list items

Question

I'm having issues with this powershell script below. It does work with SP 2007 but won't work with Sp 2010. My goal as you can see is to filter the list returned using the field Date - 1.

But getting the error:

You cannot call a method on a null-valued expression.

At C:\Users\AppData\Local\Temp\2\e70c0e06-6e66-4318-8480-952ccae0460e.ps1:31 char:20 + $col=$list.GetItems <<<< ($query)[0] + CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (GetItems:String) [], RuntimeException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : InvokeMethodOnNull

function Daily()
{
    [System.reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint") 
    [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.web")


    $site    =    new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://mysites/sites/Intranet/")                                                        
    #$web     =    $site.OpenWeb()                                                                                                
    $web=$site.rootWeb

    $list    =    $web.Lists["Communications"]                                                                              


    #$today = (Get-Date).AddDays(-1).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd")
    $today = (Get-Date).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd")


    $caml = '<Where>
                 <Eq>
                  <FieldRef Name="Date"/>
                  <Value Type="DateTime">
                  {0}
                  </Value>
                 </Eq>
               </Where>
             ' -f $today 


    $query=new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPQuery
    $query.Query=$caml
    $col=$list.GetItems($query)[0]

    $Results = @()
    foreach ($r in $col) { 


        $Title = "<b style='font-family:Calibri;'>" + $r.Title + "</b>"
        $Description = "<span style='font-family:Calibri;'>" + $r.Body + "</span>"
        $LinkToitemID = "http://Commus/DispForm.aspx?ID=" + $r.ID
        $scommsLink = "<a href=$LinkToitemID style='font-family:Calibri;'> read </a>"
        $concResult = "" + "<br><br><b style='color:#0054A4;font-size:17px;font-weight:bold'>" + $Title + "</b><br/><br/>" + $Description + "<br>" + $scommsLink + "<br><hr>"

        $Results += $concResult


    }


    $web.Dispose()
    $site.Dispose()  


    write-host $Results 

}

Answer 1

I've been fiddling around this a bit and found out that the described error occurs when list with the specified title does not exist.

Please, make sure that you have list with title "Communications" created on the http://mysites/sites/Intranet/ site collection.

If the list exist, code works fine in my environment and line $col=$list.GetItems($query)[0] doesn't raise any errors. However, I anticipate that the [0] indexer is unwanted here, because you're getting the first item of the collection to $col variable, which obviously is a logical error.

Answer 2

Your caml query may also need to be surrounded with

<query> ... <query>