Friday Fun: Get PowerShell User Groups

The other day Don Jones tweeted about find a PowerShell user group. In case you didn't know, just about every user group associated with PowerShell can be found online at http://powershellgroup.org. This is a terrific resource for finding a user group near you. Of course, Twitter being what it is someone joked about the lack of a Get-PSUserGroup cmdlet. So, taking the joke as a challenge I built on. Don also was going to build something but I haven't seen what he came up with. I suspect it will be similar to mine.

Because we there is a web site, we can scrape it with Invoke-WebRequest.

$URL = http://powershellgroup.org/og
$r = Invoke-WebRequest $url

Instead of trying to parse the document object model (DOM), the resulting object has a property called AllElements which is exactly what the name implies. I had to look at the source HTML on the page to identify the elements I needed to reference. Since it seemed I could get what I want via an HTML class, I grouped the elements by class and turned it into a hashtable.

$c = $r.AllElements | group class -AsHashTable -AsString

I opted for a hashtable to make it easier to get all the elements for a given class. For example, I knew the 'views-field views-field-title' class would give me the name of each group.

$c.'views-field views-field-title'

Likewise I knew the 'views-field views-field-description' class would provide a description.

$c.'views-field views-field-description'

Knowing what each object looked like, you could also pipe to Get-Member to discover property names, made it easy to extract the relevant information.

#get total group count less one for the header
$count = ($c.'views-field views-field-description'.count)
for ($i = 1; $i -lt $count; $i++) {
  $groupname = $c.'views-field views-field-title'[$i].innertext
  $description = $c.'views-field views-field-description'[$i].InnerText
  [pscustomobject]@{
    Name = $groupname
    Description = $description
  }
}

Once I had the core concepts down, I built an advanced function around them called Get-PSUserGroup.

Function Get-PSUserGroup {
<#
.Synopsis
Get PowerShell User Groups
.Description
This command uses Invoke-Webrequest to retrieve user group information from PowerShellGroup.org. This command has no parameters.
.Example
PS C:\> get-psusergroup

Name        : Central Texas Powershell Users Group
Description : Powershell Users Group in Central Texas
Contact     : crshnbrn
MemberCount : 3
Status      : Join
Link        : http://powershellgroup.org/CentralTexas%20-%20Austin

Name        : Strasbourg PowerShell User Group
Description : Strasbourg PowerShell User Group
Contact     : stephanevg
MemberCount : 27
Status      : Request membership
Link        : http://powershellgroup.org/strasbourg

Name        : Basel PowerShell User Group
Description : Basel PowerShell User Group
Contact     : stephanevg
MemberCount : 26
Status      : Request membership
Link        : http://powershellgroup.org/basel

...
.Link
Get-PSUserGroupDetail
Invoke-Webrequest
#>
[cmdletbinding()]
Param()

#define base URL
[string]$URL = "http://powershellgroup.org/og"

write-Verbose "Retrieving group data from $url"

Try {
    $r = Invoke-WebRequest $url -ErrorAction Stop
}
Catch {
    Throw $_.Exception.message
}

If ($r) {
    Write-Verbose "Processing results"
    $c = $r.AllElements | group class -AsHashTable -AsString
    #get total group count less one for the header
    $count = ($c.'views-field views-field-description'.count)

    Write-Verbose "Found $($count -1) groups"

    #regular expression for parsing out the HREF link
    [regex]$rx='<A href="(?<href>/\S+)"'

    #enumerate entries, skipping the first one which is a header
    for ($i = 1; $i -lt $count; $i++) {
        $groupname = $c.'views-field views-field-title'[$i].innertext
        #get link to the group page
        $href = $rx.match($c.'views-field views-field-title'[$i].innerhtml).Groups["href"].Value
        $link = "http://powershellgroup.org{0}" -f $href

        #write a custom object to the pipeline for each group
        [pscustomobject]@{
        Name = $groupname
        Description = $c.'views-field views-field-description'[$i].InnerText
        Contact = $c.'views-field views-field-name'[$i].innertext
        MemberCount = $c.'views-field views-field-member-count'[$i].InnerText
        Status = $c.'views-field views-field-subscribe'[$i].InnerText
        Link = $Link
        }
    } #for

} #if $r

} #end function

The command doesn't take any parameters and simply returns high level information about each group.

The pipelined object includes a link to the group's page which means you could try something like this:

get-psusergroup | out-gridview -title "Select a group" -PassThru | foreach { start $_.link}

All of the groups are sent to Out-GridView.

Select one or more groups and each link should open in your browser. Now you have no excuse for not finding a PowerShell User Group. And if here isn't one near you, start it!

I have some other interesting things on this topic, but I'll save those for another day. Enjoy!!

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