Microsoft 365 Community SharePoint, 11 May 2023

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Validating PowerShell parameters with SharePoint Information

Description

In this 13-minute developer-focused demo Todd Klindt shows you how to create your own PowerShell cmdlet that allows you to pull and tab through information from a site, list, text file, Azure, Graph, etc. within PowerShell environment. Learn by working through a scenario how ValidateSet and ValidateScript attributes and [ArgumentCompleter] help you deliver a better user experience, reduce bad data and make you a better coder! Bonus insight on working with chatGPT to deliver concise code.

This PnP Community demo is taken from the Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development Community call recorded on May 11, 2023.

Demo Presenter
• Todd Klindt (Sympraxis Consulting) | @ToddKlindt

Community Call Conversation
• aka.ms/May11-Demo3

Supporting materials
• Validation Repo – PoshPnP | https://github.com/ToddKlindt/PoshPnP
• Project Repo - PnP PowerShell | https://pnp.github.io/powershell/

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/community/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/community/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/community/home

A

B

So, a couple of weeks ago or a couple months ago, I was watching one of these and David did his Spiel, where you know pitch an idea and I was working on some cool stuff and I pitched it, and the selection committee picked me and it's an honor just to be nominated, I appreciate it so I'm going to be talking about Dynamic, parameter, validation and Powershell I promise, you I know what those words mean and in the next you know, 10 minutes, you'll know what those words mean uh in that order.

B

So, first a little bit about me, hi I'm, Todd, Clint I'm, a I was been a SharePoint MVP and I am officially in office services and server uh MVP um all of the code and everything that I'm going to show you is in that URL and that URL should bounce you to my GitHub repo. uh So if you want to like zone out or go watch some funny cat videos or email, your mom or whatever uh feel free to go, do that now you can get all the code it's already out. There.

B

Github was being kind of fussy this morning, so I'm not sure if that's all figured out, but it's all there and if you have any questions or anything, you can hit me up at that uh that email, address and I will reply to you. I promise. Okay, so I I do a lot of presentations, so I'm just used to having an agenda Slide. The first thing we're going to talk about is: what is this?

B

Why do we care uh the next thing I'm going to talk about is how I'm going to do this cool thing and then the last bit is the demo. The parternal here for the oh cool part, okay.

B

So what and why I've been doing Powershell since 2009, when Microsoft told us that it was going to be the admin interface for SharePoint 2010 and when, when that happened, I knew I, wasn't smart enough for Powershell. So I started following a bunch of Powershell folks and one of the early Powershell MVPs was a guy named Don Jones and he said many Sage bits of wisdom. One of the many that stuck with me was when you're writing Powershell. You should try to be the tool maker, not the tool user.

B

So of course this depends on where you're at in your Powershell journey and all that, but but that's where I am I, try to write all of my Powershell with the intention that somebody else would be able to use it like my mom would be able to use it, and so uh I I've taken a number of steps over the years to do that. One of them that I do is I use. A thing called validate set and validate set is an attribute for a parameter um and so I write. All of my Powershell I.

B

Don't have you know, PS1 files and Snippets I write them as modules and functions, and all that so validate set is an attribute you can set on a parameter that gives a set of values for that. So if it's things like you know who's your favorite kid, you could put your kids names in there.

B

That does two things that keeps the the person who's running your code, the tool user from putting in a bad value, and it also allows them to tab through if they don't want to type everything out, they can just hit tab, so I've been using that forever. It makes your stuff easier for the end user to use. It reduces bad data getting into wherever you're you're going and I'll show in a minute how that's comes up in places?

B

You wouldn't think it would, and it makes you a better coder like it makes you think, through uh these things so been using, validate set for a while, but one downside that validate set has is not very flexible uh in that it's a static set of strings. Inside of you know your code and where this came up and what I was working on a couple of months ago, when I submitted this was I've got a customer.

B

Who is a a law firm and we've been writing some management tools for them in SharePoint online, and one of the things that I added was like a case or matter auditing list. So we could see when a matter had been created and things like that it was great everybody loved it. uh You know carried off on people's shoulders and then, as we you know implemented this. They started coming up with more ideas, more actions that they wanted to audit.

B

So this was getting used by Me by them it was being consumed by an Azure function, so my module is getting uploaded Azure, uh so I was using validate, set and adding these actions, and every time we added a new action that we wanted to audit, then I would have to go and edit my code and then push it out and then the scariest part was pushing it up to the Azure function, because if you've used Azure functions, when you push code up there, there's no Version Control or anything like that.

B

It just wipes everything out. So if you're, a terrible coder like I am- and you make a mistake- you can't just roll it back so going in and changing the code just to add. Another action to that validate set was pretty scary, so I had to find another way. How did I find the solution? I know you're all asking you're on the edges of your seats, for those of you don't have cool standing desks.

B

um The way that I got around this was a thing called validate script, which is a lesser known, sibling or cousin to validate set. So now, instead of having a static set of values, now you can put a script and any magic behind that. Okay, so I've got like uh 15 minutes worth of demos and, like eight minutes to do them in so, let's jump right into that. Okay, so PowerPoint I'm done with you for a bit.

B

Okay, so I've got this list and of course, I'm not going to show you my actual customers list, because they would be very angry with that. um So this is a list and it's got a list of cars and their colors. And if we look at how I defined this list, I've got a color color column uh and it has three colors black, blue and red. You can have any color car as long as it's black, blue or red, and that comes up as a choice and importantly, allow fill in choices.

B

Allow people to put in their own colors I've got that set to no. This is called foreshadowing we're going to come back to this all right, so I've got this list with cars and colors and I want to use some Powershell to add cars and colors. Okay, so I've got a Powershell prompt.

B

This is all using the PNP every all the code that I've got so and I'm also going to upload this transcript so that you can follow along with the things that I do so I will upload this to GitHub as soon as I can so we've seen the list.

B

um I need to connect to my tenant so like all of the the the PNP commandlets, they always assume you're connected. You know get PNP list get PNP tenant site, so I write all of my stuff, uh the same way so I'm going to connect to my site I'm, going to import my module, and this is the module I'm going to show you all in a minute and let's see what happens so I've got this commandlet that I've written this function that adds cars so I added my Trans Am.

B

It's black I go in here, I refresh my list there. It is black Trans, Am, yay, Crowd, Goes Wild. Let me Zoom that in a little bit, okay, so that's pretty cool. But what happens if I want to add a yellow car I want to add a yellow. Tesla. Now remember: yellow is not one of my colors and I've got fill in values are not allowed in SharePoint, but if you go into the API, you can add invalid options. So I'm able to add this yellow Tesla boo, that's horrible!

B

So that's one of the reasons why we would want to use validate set. So let's look at the code I used for this, so this is the before picture. I just have two parameters: car name color. That's the list name that we're in I just make a variable. There, I splat it in uh nothing, nothing exciting; okay, so that didn't work. So what do I do so now? I add this validate set, so this line is the only difference between this and the previous one and I've just added the allowed colors.

B

So it's all the same things that I had in SharePoint. So this is before two. So let's look at this one. So now, let's add that cursed, yellow Tesla with our our four two and I can't because it can't validate the color yay Powershell saves the day, uh but let's make sure we can still add legitimate colors yep we can. We can still add the blue one I refresh the page, there's the blue, Tesla, okay. So that's pretty cool um yeah, it's not a feature or it's not a bug. It's a feature.

B

Okay, but one now what happens when I add another color? So let's say I get a new Tesla and it's not just blue. It's fancy blue. So this is code that added that color to our list. I did that somewhat to show to get it done quickly, more just to show off the cool things I can do in Powershell. So now, I have fancy blue there yay.

B

So now, using my before two I'm gonna, try to add a fancy blue Tesla and I can't so that's the problem that I'm trying to solve um so I've got this other thing. So now we've got after so now. This is where it fixed. So now, instead of having validate set, I have validate script and what validate script does? Is it runs code like any good script? Does it connects to the site?

B

It goes out to that field, that list the field and it pulls the choices um and then so now, as I add more colors, it's pulling that dynamically when I run this commandlet, so let's go out to Powershell. So we'll call this after.

B

And it worked so, and that was with me not having any code in there, and so, let's see what happens if I add another color right, I could I could have canned all that so I'm going to add green.

B

Okay, so I've got a green color. So now, let's try to add like a green, uh a green Honda and I can do it that same commandlet without any extra code. Okay, so um one downside that I noticed though so I was very excited. uh You know ready to do the whole mission accomplished deal.

B

um I lost my ability to do tab completion when I went from validate script to validate set so I had to go back into my code and I did some some searching on this and I had to add and we'll run out of time, so I don't get to go through it all this argument, completer and so argument. Completer gives me my tab, validation and you can see as I highlight this like it's all the same code.

B

That's in my validate script, um which kind of stinks because then, as I tweak, it I have to tweak it twice, but now it works. So now, if I do add car after and I do color I can tab, oh that's after so yeah. So if I do after, if you see this, that doesn't work so now, if I do after two.

B

One thing to keep in mind as I did this is you'll see this has a space in it when I first did this I didn't have this extra set of quotes in here, and so it would throw the value in, but it would be fancy space blue without the the quotes. So Powershell would think it was two words okay, so that is kind of the whole thing.

B

um There's a couple of other, like that's a pretty limited uh uh example, but you can use it for anything that you can code so, for instance, one of the things that I did was when I'm getting lists. So now, I've got my own commandlet now and if I'm trying to get a list in SharePoint I can tab through that or if I want to get a site name like if I want to use, get PNP site, anything that you can code you can put in here. It can be the value from a text file.

B

It can be. You know something from Azure or the graph it can be from any other rest endpoint. uh The sky is really the limit uh for that. So the final thing that I wanted to show was I got all this done. I got my demo done, I got it all done, I shipped it off to the customer, everybody loved it. It was great and then I did a fun thing. I went out to chat, GPT and I said Chad.

B

Gpt I need this and I explained all of the stuff that I wanted to do and with some tweaking I had to tweak it a little bit, but it spit out the exact same code, but it did one thing very differently. So that's what this is. This is the chat GPT version, instead of putting all that yucky code in for the validate script and the argument completer, it wrote a function to do all that and then just called that function. So now, anytime, you need to tweak the code. You want to add something.

B

You change the function instead of having to change it in two places, so that was really brilliant um and so that that's something that I've done a lot lately in the last couple of months is I've written a lot of code with chat. Gpt. Is anybody interested in seeing how I use AI to write Powershell um if that's something you're all interested in I?

B

Think the the folks here have graciously allowed me to come back on June 22nd and show that exact thing so show how I use chat GPT uh to write all of this from the chat room. It went wild. uh It was gasping, but no flabbergasting. um So that's it again. All the codes out there I got one final slide just to take y'all home.

A

Awesome stuff Todd, thank you so so much this and yes, we have Todd scheduled for that. How to use GPT for Powershell I asked it the other day. I got some Powershell questions. Can you help answer it? It said see Todd Clan. So uh there you go. He is uh he's the man foreign.