PowerShell v3 Using Visio to Display Cmdlets by Noun

To get a better grip on what all exists in the new v3 command space, I wanted to know what I could do with the Get-Command cmdlet in order to get things grouped by Noun. If this is unfamiliar to you, all cmdlets have two parts in their name as a part of the cmdlet design philosophy:

• Verb
• Noun

In the case of Get-Item, the verb is Get and the noun is Item. And, Send-MailMessage has a verb of Send and noun of MailMessage. So, whatever preceeds the dash is the verb and whatever follows is the noun. Fine. Obvious. Duh. I want to do something with this though. And, Visio is coming to mind. So, I need to get my data organized, then, I want a new chart. Thats a little more ambitious. 

Ok. Lets see about step 1: organizing the data. To get around the organization I came up with a four step command that:

1. Gets the cmdlets
2. Selects their full name and noun
3. Groups the list based on nouns
4. Selects (and expands) the groups once sorted

The command looks like this:

Get-Command-CommandType cmdlet|

selectName,@{e={($_.name -split -)[1]};N=Noun} |

groupNoun |

select-ExpandProperty Group

Easy enough. When I run this, just to give a sample, the first 10 lines looks like this:

Add-BitsFile           BitsFile 

Add-Computer           Computer 

Checkpoint-Computer    Computer 

Remove-Computer        Computer 

Rename-Computer        Computer 

Restart-Computer       Computer 

Restore-Computer       Computer 

Stop-Computer          Computer 

Add-Content            Content  

Clear-Content          Content  

Get-Content            Content  

Set-Content            Content 

Cool. Organized, simple, straightforward. Now, for the fun part...i.e., the new puzzle. How can I get these guys into a pretty format in Visio? Or, maybe Word. Ill start with Visio. Using Eds post

Hey, Scripting Guy! Is It Possible to Automate Microsoft Visio?

I was able to come up with something basic, but, it still did not have any kind of decent formatting. It simply put grouped output into rectangles in a Visio document. As I get further into the Visio object model I will try to find a clean, prettier way to put all this together. At the moment, all it does is dump them into a document. Ill actually need to move things around. For now, thats a good bit of time saved. Getting a pretty, well-formed script that really organizes this is probably a round 2 of this effort.

# Instantiate new Visio document

$application = New-Object -ComObject Visio.Application

# Add document to application

$documents = $application.Documents

# Open basic diagram template

$document = $documents.Add(Basic Diagram.vst)

# Select active document page

$pages = $application.ActiveDocument.Pages

# Select first page

$page = $pages.Item(1)

# Select basic shapes stencil

$stencil = $application.Documents.Add("Basic Shapes.vss")

# Get list of cmdlets and group by noun

Get-Command -CommandTypecmdlet |

Sort Noun|

Group noun|

ForEach-Object {

    # Build label

    $output+= "$($_.Name)`n"

    ForEach-Object{

        # Check to see if group has more than 1 cmdlet

        if($_.Group.Name.Count -gt 1)

        {

            ($_.Group.Name -split `n) |

            ForEach-Object{

                # Add cmdlet names to label with new line per cmdlet

                $output+= + $_ + "`n"

            }

        }

        else

        {

            # Add cmdlet names to label

            $output+= + $_.Group.Name

        }

    }

    # Create new square

    $item = $stencil.Masters.Item("Rectangle")

    # Drop square on page

    $shape= $page.Drop($item, 1.0, 10.6)

    # Set text to current group name

    $shape.Text = $output