Event 3 for the PowerShell Scripting Games 2013 has closed, here are a few learning points I picked up on from entries submitted.
1) Filter to the left
Some cmdlets in PowerShell have their own filtering capabilities, which can make queries of large data sets more efficient. However, not all cmdlets do have this capability and you will need to pipe the results to Where-Object instead. It’s always worth checking the help and examples for a cmdlet first to see the best way to filter and if it has an option to do so then use it!
I’ve seen quite a few entries do this
Get-WmiObject Win32_LogicalDisk -ComputerName "localhost" | Where {$_.DriveType -eq 3}
This will get you the right results, but better is to use the filter parameter of Get-WmiObject
Get-WmiObject Win32_LogicalDisk -Filter "DriveType=3"
2) ConvertTo-Html: PreContent and PostContent Parameters
Quite a few entries made nice use of these parameters to add additional content to the HTML output generated. For instance you could add an h2 header before the <table> with PreContent
Get-WmiObject Win32_LogicalDisk -filter "DriveType=3" | Select-Object Name,Size | ConvertTo-Html -PreContent "<h2>Local Fixed Disk Report</h2>" | Out-File Report.html
It’s possible to include PowerShell code as part of these parameters, so to fulfill one of the other requirements to place the date and time at the bottom of the report you could do something like this:
Get-WmiObject Win32_LogicalDisk -filter "DriveType=3" | Select-Object Name,Size | ConvertTo-Html -PreContent "<h2>Local Fixed Disk Report</h2>" -PostContent "<br><hr><p> $(Get-Date)" | Out-File Report.html
