Powershell – Need to embed an existing object inside a PSObject

powershell

I have a module that does a "get" and returns some information from a VMware host. All the return information is in a NoteProperty. I'd like to add in an type into that PSObject so that I can pipe it into a "set" cmdlet and inherit the property via ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName.

Trying to do something like this:

$obj = new-object PSObject
$obj | Add-Member Noteproperty -Name DataStoreName -value 'MYDATASTORE'
$obj | Add-Member ??? -Name VmHost -value $vmhost

And a get-member would look something like this:

   TypeName: System.Management.Automation.PSCustomObject

Name          MemberType   Definition
----          ----------   ----------
Equals        Method       bool Equals(System.Object obj)
GetHashCode   Method       int GetHashCode()
GetType       Method       type GetType()
ToString      Method       string ToString()
DataStoreName NoteProperty System.String DataStoreName=MYDATASTORE
VmHost        ?????        VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Impl.V1.Inventory.VMHostImpl

Where VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Impl.V1.Inventory.VMHostImpl represents the result of 'get-vmhost' from the VMware PowerCli cmdlets.

I'd like the user to be able to access $obj.DatastoreName which is just a NoteProperty or something more advanced like $obj.VmHost.ExtensionData.OverallStatus which is a property of the $vmhost object I got from Powercli.

I've been looking all around and can't figure out how to add a specific object type to an existing PSobject property.

Thanks,

Ben

Best Answer

The question around how do I get PowerShell to use a specific type is quite simple, because you don't need to do anything if you can already provide the result of a command that provides the type you want by using NoteProperty.

So in your example with $vmHost populated from the result of Get-VMHost you could do either of the following:

$obj = new-object PSObject
$obj | Add-Member NoteProperty -Name DataStoreName -value 'MYDATASTORE'
$obj | Add-Member NoteProperty -Name VmHost -value $vmhost

or 

$obj = New-Object PSObject -Property @{ DataStoreName = 'MYDATASTORE'; VmHost = $vmHost; }

If the $vmHost variable is not in the correct type already you would need to convert/cast the type or run a command that will get you the type before you add the NoteProperty.

Hope that helps.

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