(iBoyd)

Updated Dell Warranty Information Script

By Boyd, February 14, 2012 6:09 pm

Recently, Dell made some changes to their support website that broke the Dell Warranty Information Script. After investigating the changes, I determined that the new warranty information URL does not accept the service tag as a URL parameter, or at least it doesn’t appear to. Instead, the service tag is retrieved from a cookie that is generated when you enter the tag on this page. Good grief.

Scripting the cookies and passing them is probably possible, but I felt it was stretching the solution too far, so I adapted the script to use the undocumented SOAP web service instead. The script is below.

There are several things that I dislike about Dell’s AssetService web service:

It’s completely undocumented, and no one really knows what the guid and applicationName parameters are meant to do. I haven’t found anything indicating that it’s even a production service.
The descriptions returned for each entitlement (warranty record) aren’t as well formatted.
Sometimes, it doesn’t return the list of entitlements, so the script needs to be run again until it does.

Alas, this is going to have to work for now until a better solution presents itself. If you’ve found a better solution, please share in the comments.
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