Words: 590
Time to read: ~ 3 minutes.
Interactive
I’m an advocate of automation. I don’t think automation that requires user input is the correct way to do automation. However, there are times when user interaction is wanted.
I didn’t say “needed”, I said “wanted”.
Either a case of severe risk-aversion, or being burnt by bad bots, or skirting the fine line between wanting to be involved with the work but not wanting to do all the work.
Effectively, creating a Big Red Button, with a secondary “are you sure?” screen, followed by a “last chance” pop-up. You know, the “let’s introduce extra options to make sure things won’t go wrong” approach.
Sorry, did I say I was an automation advocate? I think I meant to write automation snob.
The Question
Most of the work I’ve been doing lately has been project-orientated, production DBA work e.g. building new servers, migrating across cloud providers, enabling TDE…
…working with Distributed AGs. I think this is the first SQL Server technology about which I swing from love to hate about in equal measure.
So, automation is nearly non-existent right now on my tasks. But, when I got asked if there was an easier way to get user input; taking into account bad answers, shortcuts, default options, etc., rather than using a plethora of Read-Host commands and double-checking the user input, well…
I didn’t know.
But, thankfully, I speak to people who are more experienced and smarter than I am when it comes to PowerShell, and I remembered them mentioning $Host.UI.PromptForChoice() before.
Initialize-Choice.ps1
Here’s the link to the code. I’m going to have to ask you to excuse the formatting. I’ve forgotten how to embed the code in an aesthetic way and have misplaced my desire to research how again.
What this provides us with is a short-hand way to generate a choice option for the user, that will not accept answers outside of the given list.
Pudding
$Choices = [ordered]@{
"Option 1" = "This is the first option"
"Option 2" = "This is the second"
"Option 3" = "The third"
"Option 4" = "You're not going to believe this..."
}
Initialize-Choice -Title 'Test 01' -Choice $Choices
Nice and simple.
The choices that we laid out have been given a shortcut number, and their ordering has been preserved. Any user input outside of the choices are automatically rejected, we can add descriptions for extra help, and we’ve even thrown in a “Cancel” choice as well.
In fact, ordering is the only thing left to mention about this function. It’s why it’s written the way it is and why it only accepts hashtables with the [ordered] accelerator on them.
Here’s how it works when I first wrote it using only hashtables.
$Choices = @{
"Option 1" = "This is the first option"
"Option 2" = "This is the second"
"Option 3" = "The third"
"Option 4" = "You're not going to believe this..."
}
Initialize-ChoiceUnordered -Title 'Test 01' -Choice $Choices
4, 2, 3, 1! Debugging this would sure be fun!
Option 1 is still option 1.
But now Option 3 has gotten jealous and pushed Option 2 down.
While Option 4 is just happy to be included.
Seeing as any code that parses the choice relies on the user picking the right option and the choices being in a determined order, it seemed like a bug to not have the input order preserved.
Sin é
So that’s it.
Feel free to use and abuse it. I would prefer that you use and improve it but it’s your party, you can do what you want to.
It’s your choice.