Vista - Developing Cmdlet

Hello

I'm rather new to PowerShell and I'm a developer with limited experience of
PowerShell and other shells like it. I have started to create som Cmdlet's
for administrating an application that I'm building. The Cmdlets is there to
ease the modification of the .NET web.config file.

So I have a Cmdlet that opens the config-file called Get-ConfigurationFile
and I then have a couple of other Cmdlet's that modifies different parts of
the config file. So long so good.

My problem is that there is a hierarchy in the config file with service and
then providers for each service. On the service there are more attributes
that could be set so my thought was to create a Cmdlet that could get the
Service and another Cmdlet that could get the providers. As input fot the
cmdlet handling the provider I need both the configuration file and the
service configuration element, so that cmdlet has two parameter properties
that are specified to get their values from the pipe. Now my problem is that
the configuration property is not set, when writing for example this command
in PS.

Get-ConfigurationFile "/TestService" | Get-Service "Service1" |
Get-ServiceProviders

I have two questions:
1. Results that are written too the pipe is only available to the next
Cmdlet? In this case Get-Service, but not Get-ServiceProviders.
2. If "yes" is the answer two the first question, then I wonder if I have
some fundamently wrong thinking in my split of Cmdlet. Is it not a good idea
to have a Cmdlet for opening the configuration, and then a lot of other
commands operating on the opened configuration? Should each Cmdlet be
responsible for opening the Cmdlet? If not ... is there any way to push the
opened configuration futher down the pipe? I would rather not use WriteObject
with the configuration in Get-Service again, because then it will clutter the
output when the command stops with Get-Service (no call to
Get-ServiceProviders).

Sorry for the long post, but I found it difficult to explain. Thanks, Eric.

Eric Quist wrote:Lookup "passthru". Not all base cmdlets support it.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...mmandbase.aspx

Example:
testtesttest <--console outputtest

Marco

--
Microsoft MVP - Windows PowerShell
http://www.microsoft.com/mvp

PowerGadgets MVP
http://www.powergadgets.com/mvp

Blog:
http://marcoshaw.blogspot.com

I did actually do a remove-item here, but lost it when I reorganized my
commands before sending the post.

OK, I looked too quickly and assumed you were using all your own
cmdlets. You are using the base 'get-service'? That get-service does
not provide a -passthru parameter.

You migth be able to substitute a script or scriptblock in the pipeline
to conserve what you might need.

Can you give a full example and what get-serviceproviders expects?

Marco

And to do that, you actually could use the -passthru parameter as I
first indicated. I'll have to see if I can find time to come up with an
example. Likely someone else will beat me to the punch.
Well, calling your cmdlet should be easier if you derive from cmdlet
when you come to invoking your cmdlets later in C#. For example:

http://marcoshaw.blogspot.com/2007/0...cmdlet_25.html
http://marcoshaw.blogspot.com/2007/0...cmdlet_24.html

Marco

What about the documentation stating: "This class cannot be used directly,
nor should it be used to derive other classes."?

Thanks, Eric

"Marco Shaw [MVP]" wrote:

Eric Quist wrote:Oh, RTFM?!

Well, that's how it would work. Otherwise, it looks like you will have
to adapt your cmdlet to take the object in, and then reoutput it again.
If that makes any sense...

A script or scriptblock could also do this likely. The v2 CTP could
even hide it somewhat with a scriptcmdlet.

Marco

How would you design cmdlets that should operate on config-files? Would you
go for the approach where you pipe the configuration (my initial try) or
would you let the configuration file be a property on each cmdlet?

Thanks in advance, Eric

"Marco Shaw [MVP]" wrote: