I have been working on account creation in AD via ServiceNow's Orchestration and found a challenge in updating the manager record. This caused me a fair amount of time to resolve so I want to share my solution for others. While there are many pieces of the puzzle documented, none walked me through the entire process.

The basics:

• I have mid servers setup and working properly with PowerShell and they have appropriate security to modify Active Directory accounts. A good article for me was located [ here ].
• My environment imports the users from LDAP, Part of that process provides source record information in the form of:
  
  • "ldap:CN=Blackstone\, John,OU=Users,DC=oasis,DC=local"

In order to update the manager in AD, you must pass the DN (Distinguished Name) which just so happens to be the part past the : in the source record. In this case it is "CN=Blackstone\, John,OU=Users,DC=oasis,DC=local"

The method I used started with splitting the string at the : and passing the array [1] down the workflow, the array[0] would be the LDAP portion. The article that helped can be found [ here ]

I found a issue where the escape character was being stripped and so the result was passed down to powershell from the workflow would fail. So I needed to add an additional escape characters, article that helped [ here ]

There are a number of articles on the community that documents the escape character issue, so I am just showing how I implemented my solution.

Step 1 Created Workflow using the example located at ServiceNow's product documentation [ here ]

Step 2 - Created Workflow Input for quick testing so I would not have to use a record producer of some sort

Step 3 - Populated the "Run Script" activity with the following code

var srce=workflow.inputs.u_manager_name.source;

srce=srce.toString();

srce=srce.split(":");

workflow.scratchpad.managerDN=srce[1];

var fIdx = workflow.scratchpad.managerDN.indexOf(",");

var lIdx = workflow.scratchpad.managerDN.indexOf(",OU=");

if (fIdx < lIdx){

        workflow.scratchpad.oName = workflow.scratchpad.managerDN.split(",OU=")[0];

        workflow.scratchpad.oPath = workflow.scratchpad.managerDN.split(workflow.scratchpad.oName)[1];

        workflow.scratchpad.fPart = workflow.scratchpad.oName.split(", ")[0];

        workflow.scratchpad.lPart = workflow.scratchpad.oName.split(", ")[1];

        workflow.scratchpad.emp_dn = workflow.scratchpad.fPart + "\, " + workflow.scratchpad.lPart + workflow.scratchpad.oPath;

}

Step 4 - Configure "Update AD Object"

Step 5 - Tested and confirmed the manager field in AD was updated.

I hope this helps you.

Thank you to all the previous authors who helped me.