Update "Manager" attribute for Active Directory when importing from a CSV

Question

I have a weird issue regards updating the "manager" field when importing from a CSV.

The following works when updating one at a time:
$user = "fred.smith"
$manager = "jane.doe"
$SamAccountName = $user
$GADuser = Get-ADUser -Filter {SamAccountName -eq $SamAccountName} -ErrorAction Stop
$GADuser | Set-ADuser -Manager $Manager -ErrorAction Stop

However, the following errors out when updating and I don't know why:
$File = "C:\temp\dr.csv"
$theuser = Import-Csv -Path $File
foreach ($user in $theuser) {
$SamAccountName = $user.Name
$manager = $user.newmanager
Try {
$GADuser = Get-ADUser -Filter {SamAccountName -eq $SamAccountName} -ErrorAction Stop
$GADuser | Set-ADuser -Manager $manager -ErrorAction Stop
}
catch {
Write-Error -Message "$SamAccountName or its manager does not exist please check in Active Directory"
}
}

Contents of the dr.csv file are:
name,newmanager
fred.smith,jane.doe
joe.smythe,jane.doe
helen.smith,jane.doe

As very similar commands to the update one at a time section but doesn't like it.

Any help would be appreciated.

Many thanks

Answer 1

The first thing that comes to mind is that there are leading or trailing spaces in either the 'name' or 'newmanager' properties.
The second is that your Get-ADUser is depending on the "-ErrorAction STOP" to prevent the Set-ADUser from executing. Unfortunaely that won't happen. Because you're using the -Filter parameter the expected terminating error will never happen of the cmdlet doesn't find a match.

See if this helps:

$File = "C:\temp\dr.csv"
$theuser = Import-Csv -Path $File
foreach ($user in $theuser) {
    $SamAccountName = $user.Name.Trim()
    $manager = $user.newmanager.Trim()
    Try {
        $GADuser = Get-ADUser -Filter { SamAccountName -eq $SamAccountName }
        if ($null -eq $GADuser){
            Write-Error -Message "$SamAccountName does not exist."
        }
        else{
            $GADuser | Set-ADUser -Manager $manager -ErrorAction Stop
        }
    }
    catch {
        Write-Error -Message "The manager '$manager' account for user '$SamAccountName' does not exist please check in Active Directory"
    }
}

BTW, replacing the information in the exception with a generic "something bad happened" doesn't help you to understand what the problem is. :-)