Get-PowerShell

During the Scripting Games I found myself creating a lot of custom objects with properties that I could use to sort , select, take averages of, and a number of other cool things. Getting results into a Powershell object can make life a lot easier for a number of reasons.

There was one little piece I was missing. Not only did I want to create a single object, quite often I would want to put all the objects I created into a collection of objects. Did you know you can add collections of like objects to each other ?

   1: PS 13 >  $a = get-process

   2: PS 14 >  $a.count

   3: 66

   4: PS 15 >  $b = get-process

   5: PS 16 >  $c = $a + $b

   6: PS 17 >  $c.count

   7: 131

   8: PS 18 >

The code above shows that I can add two collections of process objects together. Very cool.

So I tried doing this in the scripting games and came across a problem. For instance, in Event 3 we needed to tally up a bunch of votes. So what I really needed was to create a bunch of $vote objects and put them all together in a collection called $votes

Here's what I came up with at first.

By the way, when I create PS Custom Objects I cheat and use the "" | Select-Object prop1, prop2 nomenclature. My easier than using new-object followed by a bunch of add-member commands.

   1: $votes = "" | Select-Object v1,v2,v3,v4

   2: foreach ($v in Get-Content votes.txt)

   3:     {    

   4:         $vote = "" | Select-Object v1,v2,v3,v4;

   5:         $vote.v1,$vote.v2,$vote.v3,$vote.v4 = $v.split(",")

   6:         $votes += $vote

   7:     } 

Looks nice and shiny until you run it :) I get the following error:

Method invocation failed because [System.Management.Automation.PSObject] doesn't contain a method named 'op_Addition'.

Not so shiny

The trick is that we $votes needs to be a collection of $vote objects, not another object identical to $vote.

So we instantiate $votes with a cast to [array] and life is good.

   1: $votes = @()

   2: foreach ($v in Get-Content votes.txt)

   3:     {    

   4:         $vote = "" | Select-Object v1,v2,v3,v4;

   5:         $vote.v1,$vote.v2,$vote.v3,$vote.v4 = $v.split(",")

   6:         $votes = $votes + $vote

   7:     } 

A quick update, thanks to Aleksandar. We should instantiate $votes as $votes = @(). I have updated the example above.