Select-Object with Subproperties

“Get-Process | Select ProcessName, StartTime.DayOfWeek” – if you ever wanted this notation to work to give you subproperties of objects – read on. 🙂

This short notation for subproperties (in this particular case:  StartTime.DayOfWeekto get the DayOfWeek property of process start time) is unfortunately not supported in PowerShell out of the box. Instead you have to type something like: “@{Name=”Start Day”; Expression = {$_.StartTime.DayOfWeek}}” which is kind of long and scary.

Luckily PowerShell 2.0 has so called proxy functions and I have just implemented my overload of Select-Object which add the ability to directly reference subproperties as in the example above. You can find the code at PoshCode here.

Frankly, using PowerShell 2.0 code snippet for proxy functions this was quite trivial to implement. All I have to do was to check whether any Property parameters have dots, and if they do – substitute them with the long and scary expression notation. 🙂

In the code below, everything is default output from the snippet except for a dozen of lines after: “#region: Dmitry Sotnikov: substitute dotted properties with expressions”

Here’s the code you need to load in your PowerShell session to enhance the Select-Object behavior:

function Select-Object {
[CmdletBinding(DefaultParameterSetName='DefaultParameter')]
param(
  [Parameter(ValueFromPipeline=$true)]
  [System.Management.Automation.PSObject]
  ${InputObject},

  [Parameter(ParameterSetName='DefaultParameter', Position=0)]
  [System.Object[]]
  ${Property},

  [Parameter(ParameterSetName='DefaultParameter')]
  [System.String[]]
  ${ExcludeProperty},

  [Parameter(ParameterSetName='DefaultParameter')]
  [System.String]
  ${ExpandProperty},

  [Switch]
  ${Unique},

  [Parameter(ParameterSetName='DefaultParameter')]
  [ValidateRange(0, 2147483647)]
  [System.Int32]
  ${Last},

  [Parameter(ParameterSetName='DefaultParameter')]
  [ValidateRange(0, 2147483647)]
  [System.Int32]
  ${First},

  [Parameter(ParameterSetName='DefaultParameter')]
  [ValidateRange(0, 2147483647)]
  [System.Int32]
  ${Skip},

  [Parameter(ParameterSetName='IndexParameter')]
  [ValidateRange(0, 2147483647)]
  [System.Int32[]]
  ${Index})

begin
{
 try {
     $outBuffer = $null
     if ($PSBoundParameters.TryGetValue('OutBuffer', [ref]$outBuffer))
     {
         $PSBoundParameters['OutBuffer'] = 1
     }

     #region: Dmitry Sotnikov: substitute dotted properties with expressions
     if ($Property -ne $null) {
      # Iterate through properties and substitute those with dots
      $NewProperty = @()
      foreach ( $prop in $Property ) {
       if ($prop.GetType().Name -eq 'String') {
        if ($prop.Contains('.')) {
         [String] $exp = '$_.' + $prop
         $prop = @{Name=$prop; Expression = {Invoke-Expression ($exp)}}
        }
       }
       $NewProperty += $prop
      }
      $PSBoundParameters['Property'] = $NewProperty
     }
     #endregion

     $wrappedCmd = $ExecutionContext.InvokeCommand.GetCommand('Select-Object',
         [System.Management.Automation.CommandTypes]::Cmdlet)
     $scriptCmd = {& $wrappedCmd @PSBoundParameters }
     $steppablePipeline =
         $scriptCmd.GetSteppablePipeline($myInvocation.CommandOrigin)
     $steppablePipeline.Begin($PSCmdlet)
 } catch {
     throw
 }
}

process
{
    try {
        $steppablePipeline.Process($_)
    } catch {
        throw
    }
}

end
{
    try {
        $steppablePipeline.End()
    } catch {
        throw
    }
}
<#

.ForwardHelpTargetName Select-Object
.ForwardHelpCategory Cmdlet

#>
}