YAML Ain’t Markup Language, its purpose is a data-oriented, rather than document markup. Combining this with PowerShell is potent, adding PowerShell classes, well its like adding bacon bits to bacon and eggs.

In this post, we’ll take it around the block.

Hello YAML

Key value pairs are easy, and we get a PowerShell object with property names.

@"
receipt: Purchase Invoice
date:    2016-08-06
"@ | ConvertFrom-Yaml

Prints

receipt          date
-------          ----
Purchase Invoice 2016-08-06

Arrays

Now add an items property that creates an array. Use - to create a collection of ordered value.

Note: YAML uses white space to indicate scoping of items

@"
receipt: Purchase Invoice
date:    2016-08-06
items :
  - pens
  - pencils
"@ | ConvertFrom-Yaml

Prints

receipt          date       items
-------          ----       -----
Purchase Invoice 2016-08-06 {pens, pencils}

Let’s Get Complicated

Multi-nesting. Here we have a Purchaser with a MailingAddress and a State. Try to represent that using PSCustomObject and a HashTable.

$r = @"
Purchaser :
    - Name : John
      MailingAddress :
        Street : 33 Gramercy Park
        City : NY
        State : New York
      Age : 10

"@ | ConvertFrom-Yaml

$r.Purchaser.MailingAddress.State

Prints

New York

Wait, there’s more

Now, what happens if you use these structures in your PowerShell scripts and someone fat fngers Age with AgeX. If you tried $r.Purchaser.Age, PowerShell would print nothing. This is where we add the bacon bits.

PowerShell Classes

Let’s introduce the Data class, cast $r to it, and print out the Purchaser.Age.

This buys us some intellisense when we type ([Data]$r). but we want some more saftey.

class Data {
    $Purchaser
}

$r = @"
Purchaser :
    - Name : John
      Age : 10
"@ | ConvertFrom-Yaml

([Data]$r).Purchaser.Age

Let’s create a Purchaser class, add another purchaser and make an error by changing Age to AgeX.

Add the Purchaser Classe

Notice, we type the $Purchaser variable in the Data class as an array of Purchaser.

We also added Jane as and incorrectly specifed AgeX instead of Age.

class Purchaser {
    $Name
    $Age
}

class Data {
    [Purchaser[]]$Purchaser
}

$r = @"
Purchaser :
    - Name : John
      Age : 10
    - Name : Jane
      AgeX : 5
"@ | ConvertFrom-Yaml

[Data]$r

Using a PowerShell class lets us find errors early in the process and without any coding logic on our part.

Prints

Error: "Cannot convert the "@{Name=Jane; AgeX=5}"

A lot of Potential

This can be applied to many scenarios. Having a data oriented human-readble file that can be easily used in PowerShell and have it’s structure easily validated is tremendous.

In future posts we’ll kick it up a few notches.