Exception Handling with AD PowerShell - powershell

Question

I am building a PowerShell script to create AD Groups (Global and DomainLocal) by Importing their names from a Csv file.
I am having a hard time handling exceptions that will be generated in case Groups already exist.
What I want to achieve is if the Groups do not exist by the name in Csv then PS should create them and show message "Groups have been created" and if they already exist then it should display "Groups already exist" line by line so that if one exists and the other one doesn't then it should display the corresponding message.
What is happening is that PS doesn't display a message when it has created groups and when exception does occur it displays message only for Global Group not Local.
Please advise
Here's the code -
Try {
New-ADGroup -Name TestGlobal -GroupCategory Security -GroupScope Global -ManagedBy TEMP01 -Description "Owner is TEMP01" -Path (Some OU)
} Catch [Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management.ADException] {
if ($_ -like "The specified group already exists") {
Write-Host “!!! GLOBAL GROUP ALREADY EXISTS !!!”
} elseif ($_ -eq $null) {
Write-Host " GLOBAL GROUP CREATED SUCCESSFULLY "
}
}
Try {
New-ADGroup -Name TestLocal -GroupCategory Security -GroupScope DomainLocal -ManagedBy TEMP02 -Description "Owner is TEMP02" -Path (Some OU)
} Catch [Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management.ADException] {
if ($_ -like "The specified group already exists") {
Write-Host “!!! LOCAL GROUP ALREADY EXISTS !!!”
} elseif ($_ -eq $null) {
Write-Host " LOCAL GROUP CREATED SUCCESSFULLY "
}
}

Answer 1

PowerShell is a bit strange in that, by default, errors are non-terminating. That means that errors will be output to the console, but it will just continue on to the next line of code as if nothing happened.
Unfortunately, Try blocks only respond to terminating errors.
You can change this behaviour. On both of your New-ADGroup lines, add this to the end:
-ErrorAction Stop
That will tell PowerShell that you want it to treat errors on that line as terminating.
If you want, you can do some more reading about it here:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/2014/07/09/handling-errors-the-powershell-way/
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/2014/07/05/weekend-scripter-using-try-catch-finally-blocks-for-powershell-error-handling/