How to use Remove-LocalGroupMember to remove from a server? - powershell

Question

I have the following script that is supposed to remove members from a server:
$ssasInstance = ""
$accountName= ""
Import-Module SqlServer
[Microsoft.AnalysisServices.Server]$SSASserver = New-Object ([Microsoft.AnalysisServices.Server])
$SSASserver.Connect($ssasInstance)
$role= $SSASserver.Roles["Administrators"]
$role.Members.Remove($accountName)
$role.Update()
The problem is for some reason Remove() is not really working, no errors generated, but it doesnt remove the user.
I tested the script by instead adding a user, $role.Members.Add($accountName) and this works great! so i know that it must be a bug with the remove() method, and the only option I have is to use Remove-LocalGroupMember
I tried just using it like this:
$ssasInstance = ""
$accountName= ""
Import-Module SqlServer
[Microsoft.AnalysisServices.Server]$SSASserver = New-Object ([Microsoft.AnalysisServices.Server])
$SSASserver.Connect($ssasInstance)
$role= $SSASserver.Roles["Administrators"]
Remove-LocalGroupMember -Group "Administrators" -Member "$accountName"
$role.Update()
but that doesnt work either...although i think its because it doesnt know exactly where its removing from...
I tried this too, but to no avail:
Remove-LocalGroupMember -Group "$role" -Member "$accountName"
So how can i integrate this module into my script?

Answer 1

This is an unfortunate confluence of circumstances: when you do
$role.Members.Add("member")
This works because, under water, the string "member" is implicitly converted by PowerShell to a RoleMember with a Name of member and an empty Sid. All fine. However, if you then do
$role.Members.Remove("member")
Nothing happens, because you will create a new RoleMember instance, and since RoleMember has no implementation of .Equals() (a fairly bizarre oversight), different instances will never be considered the same.
This means you can only remove members by getting the actual instance in the collection (or by index, I suppose):
$member = $role.Members.Where{$_.Name -eq "member"} | Select -First 1
$role.Members.Remove($member)
Note that you will not get an error if there is no such member (because Remove allows $null, again in a rather bizarre oversight), so you may want to check for $member -eq $null if you want to verify that.
Definitely do not use Remove-LocalGroupMember -- that cmdlet is part of a completely different module and removes members from local Windows groups, not SSAS roles.