Searching for XML Elements

Hello,

First, allow me to explain that I am a newb to PoSH, .NET, and
processing XML altogether, so apologise in advance for such basic
questions. I'm coming straight from VB6/VBScript to all of this
wonderful new stuff, and it's all a bit overwhelming.

In any event, hoping that someone can assist. I took a copy of
Microsoft's CreateXMLFromEnvironment.wsf from the Group Policy
Management Console, modified it slightly such that it outputs Group
Policy GUIDs, and am looking for a way to create a PS1 to query all of
the unique GUIDs contained therein. The XML structure looks something
like this:

<DomainRoot>
<OU Name="OUName1">
<OU Name="OU2">
<GPOLink GPOName="Policy1" GUID="abcdefg1">
<OU Name="OU3">
<GPOLink GPOName="Policy2" GUID="abcdefg2">
</OU>
</OU>
</OU>
</DomainRoot>

So, in other words, the GPOLink attribute can exist anywhere in the
tree, and it might or might not be present.

I've been trying things like get-childitem such that I might create a
recursive function, but so far that hasn't gotten my anywhere. Also
tried... think it was maybe sort-object -unique? Can't remember off
hand. Anyway, that got me nowhere either. Tried enumerating child
objects using the XML .get_firstchild and others, and got stuck on
those too. If I could write this in SQL, could figure it out, but this
syntax is killing me. And how do you get help on the methods defined
in the System.Xml.XmlLinkedNode objects?

Hoping that someone can give me a clue.

Thanks,
Shawn.

<sferrier@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1174525453.049237.7360@d57g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
> Hello,
>
> First, allow me to explain that I am a newb to PoSH, .NET, and
> processing XML altogether, so apologise in advance for such basic
> questions. I'm coming straight from VB6/VBScript to all of this
> wonderful new stuff, and it's all a bit overwhelming.
>
> In any event, hoping that someone can assist. I took a copy of
> Microsoft's CreateXMLFromEnvironment.wsf from the Group Policy
> Management Console, modified it slightly such that it outputs Group
> Policy GUIDs, and am looking for a way to create a PS1 to query all of
> the unique GUIDs contained therein. The XML structure looks something
> like this:
>
> <DomainRoot>
> <OU Name="OUName1">
> <OU Name="OU2">
> <GPOLink GPOName="Policy1" GUID="abcdefg1">
> <OU Name="OU3">
> <GPOLink GPOName="Policy2" GUID="abcdefg2">
> </OU>
> </OU>
> </OU>
> </DomainRoot>

Welcome to wonderful world of PowerShell. :-)

PowerShell has pretty decent native support for XML. For example you can
create a .NET XML object by just casting a string (or array or strings) to
[xml] like so (assuming the string represents valid XML):

$xml = [xml](get-content guid.xml)

Now you can do stuff like this:

$xml.DomainRoot.OU.OU

Name GPOLink
OU
---- -------
--
OU2 GPOLink
OU

That is the XML elements show up as properties on the PowerShell xml
objects. You can also access the .NET XML methods one of which is the very
handy SelectNodes() which takes an XPath expression. So you could pretty
easily do what you want with this:

$xml = [xml](get-content guid.xml)
$xml.SelectNodes('//@GUID') | sort #text -uniq

Where #text represents the text value of the GUID attribute.

--
Keith