Hi everyone, Excited about the new Custom Apple Profiles features, such as variables. We are using custom profiles all the time. Recently though we ran into an issue with <data> payloads. It seems Meraki parses those payloads as strings and adding line breaks (\n) and tabs (\t) to the payload. To give you an example, I have prepared a testing profile 'TestingData.mobileconfig'. It contains a Base64 encoded data payload of 'SGVsbG8sIFdvcmxkCg==' that decodes to 'Hello, World'. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>PayloadContent</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>TestBase64AsData</key>
<data>SGVsbG8sIFdvcmxkCg==</data>
<key>TestBase64AsString</key>
<string>Hello, World</string>
<key>PayloadDescription</key>
<string>Testing Base64 Parsing / Coding</string>
<key>PayloadDisplayName</key>
<string>Test Base64</string>
<key>PayloadIdentifier</key>
<string>com.example.9A4C94F2-65FC-42E4-9EB2-BBE7B34950F9</string>
<key>PayloadType</key>
<string>com.example.testingdata</string>
<key>PayloadUUID</key>
<string>9A4C94F2-65FC-42E4-9EB2-BBE7B34950F9</string>
<key>PayloadVersion</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>
</array>
<key>PayloadDisplayName</key>
<string>Testing Data Payload</string>
<key>PayloadIdentifier</key>
<string>com.example.testingdata</string>
<key>PayloadRemovalDisallowed</key>
<false/>
<key>PayloadType</key>
<string>Configuration</string>
<key>PayloadScope</key>
<string>System</string>
<key>PayloadUUID</key>
<string>03ADDA1A-DB8F-4957-B359-E813FC52EA4D</string>
<key>PayloadVersion</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>
</plist> If you install this profile directly, i.e. locally on a Mac by double clicking on it, its 'TestBase64AsData' payload is correctly recognised as data. If you then install the same profile via Meraki Systems Manager its data payload gets displayed as: (
"Hello, World\n\t\t\t\t"
) Profile installed locally Profile installed via Meraki Systems Manager This leads to problems when working with <data> payloads in scripts and external programs. As an example, to reproduce the output mentioned above you can use the following Swift code and put into a file named 'print-example.swift'. Then run 'swift print-example.swift' from the command line: #!/usr/bin/swift
import Foundation
import CoreFoundation
let appID = "com.example.testingdata"
let key = "TestBase64AsData"
if let value = CFPreferencesCopyAppValue(key as CFString, appID as CFString) {
print(value)
print("Type: \(type(of: value))")
} <data> is a valid payload as mentioned in Apple's Configuration Profile Reference: "Configuration profiles are written in property list format, with Data values stored in Base64 encoding. The .plist format can be read and written by any XML library." All testing was done on macOS 10.14.4. Has anybody else run into this issue?
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