I am new to working with PowerCLI and need to pull all the Tag Assignments from the VMs. Getting this information is relatively simple, but controlling the output into a format I need it to be is proving rather difficult.

here is the code I am working with.

Get-VM | Get-TagAssignment | select entity, Tag | sort Entity | format-table -AutoSize

the output is pretty easy to understand and looks like the table below.

I am new to working with PowerCLI and need to pull all the Tag Assignments from the VMs. Getting this information is relatively simple, but controlling the output into a format I need it to be is proving rather difficult.

here is the code I am working with.

Get-VM | Get-TagAssignment | select entity, Tag | sort Entity | format-table -AutoSize

the output is pretty easy to understand and looks like the table below.

As you can see, it duplicates the server name and lines it up with the Tag information. It is sorted by Entity so the Tag info can appear out of order. some of the servers have multiple Tags for the same Tag Category as seen in the Server 3 example above. What I am trying to do is to remove the duplicate Server names and create custom columns for the tag output.

Creating custom tables with custom formats in PowerShell/PowerCLI is a problem for me and really need some help with this one.

Thank you in advance for any help and suggestions.

• powershell
• powercli

2 Answers 2

Use the Group-Object cmdlet to group objects together by a common property expression:

# prepare a collection of property/column names
$propertyNames = @('Entity')

# group tag records by entity
$tagsGroupedByEntity = Get-VM |Get-TagAssignment |Select Entity, Tag |Group-Object Entity

$results = $tagsGroupedByEntity |ForEach-Object {
  # create a table of properties for the result object for each group
  $resultRecord = [ordered]@{ Entity = $_.Name }
  foreach ($tagRecord in $_.Group) {
    # split category and content apart 
    $category, $content = $tagRecord.Tag -split '/',2
    # update result object table with tag contents
    $resultRecord[$category] = $content
    # add any previously-unseen category name to the list of property names
    if ($category -notin $propertyNames) {
      $propertyNames += $category
    }
  }

  # create and output result object
  [pscustomobject]$resultRecord
}

# use property name list to ensure all the objects have the same shape
$results |Select-Object -Property $propertyNames

Note:

• This answer does not provide the specific table layout you're asking for; doing the latter requires nontrivial processing as shown in Mathias' helpful answer.

• Instead, it shows a simpler alternative using standard cmdlet features, producing a grouped tabular layout that may be good enough.

  • Note that, due to relying on Format-Table, the results are strictly for display rather than for later programmatic processing, as is the case for all Format-* cmdlets.

Get-VM | 
  Get-TagAssignment |
  Sort-Object Entity, Tag -Unique |
  Format-Table -GroupBy Entity -Property Tag -AutoSize 

• Tag is passed as a secondary property to sort by to Sort-Object; note that the assumption is that lexical sorting results in the desired sort order; if this assumption doesn't hold you can pass a script block in which you can transform each tag value to result in the desired sort order.

• -Unique eliminates duplicate tag values.

• Passing property name Entity to Format-Table's -GroupBy parameter causes the formatted object representations to be grouped by shared entity value.

Output based on your sample input data:

   Entity: Server1

Tag
---
VM:TagCategory1/Content1
VM:TagCategory2/Content2
VM:TagCategory3/Content3
VM:TagCategory4/Content4
VM:TagCategory5/Content5

   Entity: Server2

Tag
---
VM:TagCategory1/Content1
VM:TagCategory2/Content2
VM:TagCategory3/Content3
VM:TagCategory4/Content4
VM:TagCategory5/Content5

   Entity: Server3

Tag
---
VM:TagCategory1/Content1
VM:TagCategory2/Content2
VM:TagCategory3/Content3
VM:TagCategory4/Content4
VM:TagCategory5/Content5

   Entity: Server4

Tag
---
VM:TagCategory1/Content1
VM:TagCategory2/Content2
VM:TagCategory3/Content3
VM:TagCategory4/Content4
VM:TagCategory5/Content5