Friday Fun: View Objects in a PowerShell GridList

One of the things that makes PowerShell easy to learn is discoverability. Want to know more about a particular type of object? Pipe it to Get-Member. Or if you want to see values pipe it to Select-Object.

get-ciminstance win32_computersystem | select *

That's not too bad. Or you can pipe to Out-Gridview.

Get-CimInstance win32_computersystem | Select * | out-gridview

However, for a single object it isn't easy to see everything .

What would be easier, at least for me, is to use Out-Gridview but see the properties in a list like I can with Select-Object. So I wrote an advanced function to do just that. The function takes an incoming object, creates a hashtable based on the object's properties and then displays the hashtable in Out-Gridview.

Function Out-GridList {
[cmdletbinding()]

Param(
[Parameter(Position=0,Mandatory,ValueFromPipeline)]
[object]$InputObject,
[string]$Title="Out-GridList",
[switch]$Passthru
)

Begin {
  #initialize data array
  $data=@()
}
Process {
#initialize a hashtable for properties
$propHash = @{}
#get property names from the first object in the array
$properties = $InputObject | Get-Member -MemberType Properties

$properties.name | foreach {
Write-Verbose "Adding $_"
  $propHash.add($_,$InputObject.$_)
  
} #foreach

  $data +=$propHash

} #Process

End {

#tweak hashtable output
$data.GetEnumerator().GetEnumerator() | 
select @{Name="Property";Expression={$_.name}},Value |
Out-GridView -Title $Title -PassThru:$Passthru
}

} #end Out-Gridlist

The function will accept multiple objects, which is why I have a data array to handle multiple piped in objects. But it really works best with a single object. In the Process scriptblock I pass the object to Get-Member to retrieve properties. Then the function creates a hashtable where the key is each property and the value is the corresponding value from the object.

At this point I could simple write the hashtable to Out-Gridview, but the column headings would say Name and Value. It's a small detail but I use a hashtable with Select-Object to rename "Name" to "Property". By the way, you may have noticed this line.

$data.GetEnumerator().GetEnumerator() 

That isn't a typo. If I pipe multiple objects, then $data will be an array of hashtables and so I need to get an enumerator for each one. But with this function now I get the display I want.

get-ciminstance win32_computersystem | select * | out-gridlist -title "Win32_Computersystem"

There really isn't any filtering to do but you can click on the column headings to sort. Or your can run Out-Gridlist with -passthru so you can select properties and pass them through to the pipeline.

I hope you find this useful. Enjoy responsibly.

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