The following is a recounting of an issue that I had and how I went about resolving it. No computers were harmed in the making of this post.

Ask me for one PowerShell command that everyone should know and I can answer you: Get-Help.

Fairly descriptive name if you ask me. Today I’m focusing on using Get-Help selectively to help me figure out why my custom function just won’t accept parameters!

You say Test Case. I say Basket Case.

We are going to need a custom test function for the audience to play along with at home, luckily Shane’s got you covered.
This is a Tactical Estimation of Shane’s Test function – aka T.E.S.T. function; very simple but all the important parts are there.

Function Test-FunctionByParameter {
    [cmdletbinding()]
    Param(
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true,
                   ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = $true)]
        [string]$Parameter
    )
    process {
        "Success, I'm [$Parameter]"
    }
}

If I’ve done my maths right, and I always do my maths right (as far as you know), then this function should take input from the pipeline and output it in the string “Success, I’m …”

Do I do my maths right?

Get-Service -Name *sql* |
Select Name -first 1 |
Test-FunctionByParameter

Huh, parameter problem.

I thought this was supposed to work like this. You pipe in information, magic happens, and functions work, no?

Well, when in doubt, Get-Help.

Get-Help:

Before I go any further though, just so that everyone knows how to use Get-Help, I’m going to show you one of the secret techniques for using Get-Help.

Get-Help *help*

Why does help exist?

When you think about it, why is there even a function called help?
As far as I’m aware it’s basically the same as Get-Help except it automatically pipes the output to | more so we get pages rather than a wall of text.

Is there more that we can do with Get-Help though? Is there a way that we can return the examples only? Syntax only? Parameters only?

Is there not a way that we can do such things?!

Yessum, the Possums cousin

Okay I cheated on the first one; examples are pretty easy. PowerShell actually already takes care of that for you.

Get-Help Get-Help -examples

The other two, while not laid out for you as pretty as that, are not that difficult to do. What needs to be remembered about Get-Help is that it is a cmdlet. And what do cmdlets normally output?…

What?! No! Objects!
They normally output Objects! Wow…next time just pipe it to Get-Member if you don’t know.

I Object!

Now I first saw this done in a blog post by Adam Bertram ( blog | twitter ) but I do believe that it warrants further highlighting.

If you did pipe Get-Help to | Get-Member you would have seen a NoteProperty called syntax, so if we want the syntax for a cmdlet, we can specify that using:

(Get-Help Get-Help).syntax

So for parameters we need…yup .parameters.

(Get-Help Get-Help).parameters

Hmm, not as handy as I thought it would be. What happens if we pipe that to Get-Member (Alias gm as I’m getting lazy here)?

(Get-Help Get-Help).parameters | gm

Let’s try that and see what we get, shall we?

(Get-Help Get-Help).parameters.parameter

It’s always brightest before the dawn

And the answer comes always before you smash your screen in rage.

If we pipe the above information to Get-Member again, we get more useful information this time (I’m not going to show it, you know how to pipe to gm by now).

I’m from a database background so can we make this pretty, all I care about is the name and the pipeline input.

(Get-Help Get-Help).parameters.parameter |
    Select-Object -Property name,pipelineinput

By Odin’s Beard! I mean PropertyName

You know one of these days I should really read this help file (you should too) because half way down the results of the following code is some interesting info…

help about_pipelines

METHODS OF ACCEPTING PIPELINE INPUT

Cmdlets parameters can accept pipeline input in one of two different ways:

— ByValue: Parameters that accept input “by value” can accept piped objects
that have the same .NET type as their parameter value or objects that can be
converted to that type.

For example, the Name parameter of Start-Service accepts pipeline input
by value. It can accept string objects or objects that can be converted to
strings.

— ByPropertyName: Parameters that accept input “by property name” can accept piped
objects only when a property of the object has the same name as the parameter.

For example, the Name parameter of Start-Service can accept objects that have
a Name property.

(To list the properties of an object, pipe it to Get-Member.)

Some parameters can accept objects by value or by property name. These parameters are
designed to take input from the pipeline easily.

So that’s the problem?! The names need to match up! I can do that with Select-Object!

All I need to do is add a custom label using @{Label='<custom label>';Expression={'<custom expression>'}}

Try{}Catch{}Finally{}

Get-Service -Name *sql* |
Select-Object -First 1 -Property @{l='Parameter';e={$_.Name}} |
Test-FunctionByParameter

So now when I run a command and get the crazy…

The input object cannot be bound to any parameters for the command either because the command does not take pipeline input or the input and its properties do not match any of the parameters that take pipeline input.

I can just run:

(Get-Help <cmdlet name>).parameters.parameter |
Select-Object Name,pipelineInput

And know exactly where to fix! 🙂