{"id":6428,"date":"2019-01-15T14:11:38","date_gmt":"2019-01-15T19:11:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jdhitsolutions.com\/blog\/?p=6428"},"modified":"2019-01-23T16:21:56","modified_gmt":"2019-01-23T21:21:56","slug":"a-powershell-core-out-gridview-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jdhitsolutions.com\/blog\/powershell-core\/6428\/a-powershell-core-out-gridview-solution\/","title":{"rendered":"A PowerShell Core Out-Gridview Solution"},"content":{"rendered":"

As many of you know, this year I've made the jump to PowerShell Core<\/a> as my \"daily driver\". A major driving factor was to discover the limitations. There are certainly plenty of advantages as we move to a cross-platform world. But the PowerShell Core is based .NET Core which does not include everything we are used to in a full Windows desktop. One of the major limitations that concern many people is the loss of support for graphical tools. There is no support for Windows Forms or WPF in PowerShell Core. Perhaps the biggest lament I hear is the loss of Out-Gridview<\/a>. I get it. The command can be a useful tool. Now -- what if I were to tell you that you could run a command In PowerShell Core and still send the results to the Out-Gridview command you know and love?<\/p>\n

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Requirements<\/h2>\n

My solution, which is really not much more than a workaround, assumes you are running a Windows desktop like Windows 10 which means you have access to Windows PowerShell. The premise behind my solution is pretty simple: take the output of\u00a0 a PowerShell Core command and send it to a Windows PowerShell instance running Out-Gridview. As long as you can use Out-Gridview in a Windows PowerShell session, and I can't image why you\u00a0 couldn't, then you are all set.<\/p>\n

An Out-Gridview Alternative for PowerShell Core<\/h2>\n

The essential part of my solution is running the PowerShell.exe command to start a new instance. At a prompt if you type powershell \/?<\/em> you'll see the syntax. I was originally trying to send the PowerShell Core output as an argument for the scriptblock. But there are limitations on the size of the scriptblock. So I took the next best step I could think of.\u00a0 I take the output of the PowerShell core command and serialize it to a file using Export-Clixml<\/a>. In the PowerShell.exe\u00a0 scriptblock I convert it back using Import-Clixml<\/a> and pipe the results to Out-Gridview.<\/p>\n

I wanted to duplicate the functionality of Out-Gridview as much as possbile. I wanted to be able to display results or display and select. The challenge I encountered was that when simply displaying Out-Gridview, the Windows PowerShell window opens and closes before you can see anything. Using -Passthru provides the experience you expect. My solution was to add a Pause statement at the very end. This keeps the Windows PowerShell window open until you press Enter. And you can still pass objects back to PowerShell Core.<\/p>\n

The code for this magic is on Github<\/a>.<\/p>\n