One of my frustrations over the past year and a half has been deploying ASO applications via EPMA. There are multiple reasons: you have less options/functionality than using classic ASO, you don’t get helpful errors to the issues (think chasing your tail for hours on end) and the issue of the counter that only lets you deploy 255 times divided by the number of dimensions in your cube minus the number of times you have already deployed it. (See here and here.) Because you have to reset the counter by compacting the ASO outline before you reach the terminus point of deployment in EPMA, it is often recommended to use the ESSCMDQ utility to compact your outline after x amount of deploys to be safe.
Another frustration I have is that you cannot encrypt the password for ESSCMDQ. Admins do not like this! So, today when I was going through another round of EAS/EPMA/ESSCMDQ automation, it occurred to me – could I use a DOS prompt when calling the ESSCMDQ script to have the user type in the username/password instead of storing it? Come to find out, YES, you can!
I started by using Scott Danesi’s automation script as I find it pretty cool. I also like the fact that the script deletes the automation script with the username/password at the conclusion of runing the script. …Ideal for not storing a username/password. …Except I changed two lines.
Scott’s original lines are:
SET UserName=%4SET Password=%5
I had to once do that for Studio MaxL.
I created an exe which sets username and password. Then the bat file can use it by calling the exe.
Had to delete the log file after execution though. The utility is called BattoExe, it can convert a batch file to an exe