PowerShelled

This blog has moved to http://ThePowerShellGuy.com Greetings /\/\o\/\/ $AtomFeed = ("Atom.xml")
$PreviousItems = (" TechNet Webcast: An Overview of Windows PowerShell "," "Windows PowerShell: TFM" goes "Gold" "," PowerShell : Advanced renaming of files "," PowerShell : Playing with LeapYears "," Download PowerShell 1.0 RTM "," PowerShell goes RTM "," Windows PowerShell Week on ScriptCenter "," PowerShell : How Can I Split a String Only on Spec... "," PowerShell : How Can I Tell Whether a Number is Ev... "," PowerShell : 99-bottles-of-beer "," ")

Monday, December 04, 2006

PowerShell : making Custum Enums

In PowerShell you often see the use of enum's

for some info , examples of Enums and there usage see :

/\/\o\/\/ PowerShelled: Exploring .NET types, classes and Enums ...,

/\/\o\/\/ PowerShelled: Get SpecialFolder Locations in Monad,

/\/\o\/\/ PowerShelled: Adding a Simple AccesRule to a file ACL in MSH

as you can see in the Special Forder function this is very handy for some parameters :

It is not possible yet to create Enums and classes directly in PowerShell, but there is a way by using Reflection :

# Make a Custom Enum in PowerShell

$cd = [AppDomain]::CurrentDomain

$an = new-object System.Reflection.AssemblyName('Mow')
$ab = $cd.DefineDynamicAssembly($an,'RunAndSave')
$mb = $ab.DefineDynamicModule($an.Name, "$($an.Name).dll")
$eb = $mb.DefineEnum("Fruit",'Public', [int])

& {
  $eb.DefineLiteral('Apple',1)
  $eb.DefineLiteral('strawberry',2)
  $eb.DefineLiteral('Banana',3)
} | out-null

$t = $eb.CreateType()

It might not look that way, but this is "Fasten your Seatbells (c) Jeffrey Snover" - Code (you can even create complete classes this way but that's outside my "Scope" (@ reading developers : but this would be real cool material for a CMDlet *Wink* *Wink* )),

Hence, I won't go into the workings to much, to get an impression after runnin the code try :

$cd,$an,$mb,$eb | gm

but the code as is, is easy to customize, e.g. to add a Kiwi to the list with number 4 add a line like this

$eb.DefineLiteral('Kiwi',4)

As you can see here this is handy for custom functions :

...

PoSH>$t = $eb.CreateType()

PoSH>[fruit]

IsPublic IsSerial Name BaseType
-------- -------- ---- --------
True True Fruit System.Enum
PoSH>[enum]::GetNames([fruit])
Apple
strawberry
Banana

PoSH>function new-FruitShake ([fruit]$f) {"Here is your $f Shake"}

PoSH>new-FruitShake Apple
Here is your Apple Shake

PoSH>new-FruitShake chocolate
new-FruitShake : Cannot convert value "chocolate" to type "Fruit" due to invalid enumeration values. Specify one of the
following enumeration values and try again. The possible enumeration values are "Apple, strawberry, Banana".
At line:1 char:15
+ new-FruitShake <<<< chocolate