Powershell event returns Too many posts made to a semaphore

Question

Hi there,

I wrote a Powershell script that converts the .xlsx output of a workflow to a .xlsb and then password protects it. The script runs perfectly when run on its own, however I've added an event to my Alteryx workflow that should run the script and it returns Error: Designer x64: The Designer x64 reported: Error running Event #1: The external program "C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" returned an error code: 1: Too many posts were made to a semaphore. (298).

I've googled this error for a long time and nothing seems to actually explain what's going on.

Would anyone know what to do?

Thanks

Diana

DianaRus · Answer

Thanks for the reply Joshua, I've tried running it through the run command tool, but as much as I read about how to configure the tool it never worked for me, in principal it said that it can't open Powershell to run the script, it also asked me for an input and an output, which I found weird, because the input is supposed to be the rest of my workflow and the output is specified in the script.

I tried running my script through cmd and it doesn't work, says 'is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.', however it does run when I run it in the Powershell environment or just right click on it and Run with Powershell.

Any other ideas?

joshuaburkhow · Answer

Hey @DianaRus

So I found this:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Knowledge-Base/Batch-Files-in-Alteryx-Part-2-Moving-Files/ta-p/15665

Not sure if you tried these steps. Instead of running in an event could you try running in a standard run command tool?

Also @grossal has nice test script (even though it's in Python) that you could use to test further here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Pass-the-argument-to-Python-via-events/td-p/613465

Also this might be something here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Error-Too-many-posts-were-made-to-a-semaphore/td-p/483700

Hope this helps!