EZOut | Walkthrus | Creating A New View

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The next view we can improve with Write-FormatView is how devices look A way to get the devices on the operating system is:

Get-WmiObject Win32_PnPEntity

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In earlier examples, we saw how to create a quick table view. Let's do that for Win32_PnpEntity.

To start out with, let's get the typename.

$typeName =             
    Get-WmiObject Win32_PnPEntity |             
        Get-Member |            
        Select-Object TypeName -Unique            
                    
$typeName |            
    Write-FormatView -Property Name, Status, Manufacturer, DeviceID -AutoSize |            
    Out-FormatData |            
    Add-FormatData

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Let's see the difference

Get-WmiObject Win32_PnpEntity

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That's much better, but the Manufacturer information is repeated a lot, and it takes up a lot of space on the screen. If we're careful about the order the data goes in, we can improve the appearance of the output by using the -GroupByProperty parameter.

$typeName |            
    Write-FormatView -Property Name, Status, DeviceID -AutoSize -GroupByProperty Manufacturer |            
    Out-FormatData |            
    Add-FormatData

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Let's see the difference

Get-WmiObject Win32_PnpEntity |            
    Sort-Object Manufacturer

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It's very important to sort before you pipe into grouped views.

GroupBy will add a header to all items from the object pipeline that have the same property.

Whenever a new value for that property is encountered, a new header will be added. This means that if you output a bunch of objects by a grouping that comes out of order, you will see a lot of groups. Let's the difference by showing the same data without sorting.

Get-WmiObject Win32_PnpEntity

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It looks much, much better sorted

Get-WmiObject Win32_PnpEntity |            
    Sort-Object Manufacturer

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The only unfortunate thing about this view is that both the deviceID and the name are very long. It would be better to show them in a list instead. Luckily, Write-FormatView has the -AsList switch, which does just that.

$typeName |            
    Write-FormatView -Property Name, Status, DeviceID -GroupByProperty Manufacturer -AsList |            
    Out-FormatData |            
    Add-FormatData

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Let's see the difference

Get-WmiObject Win32_PnpEntity |            
    Sort-Object Manufacturer

EZOut | Creating A New View

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