Skip to main content

Recording a Data in a Log

I’m wrapping up another PowerShell class right now in Fort Wayne, IN.  At the end of my classes, I like to do a “Project Day”.  I invite my class to do a project for themselves in our test environment so I can coach them.  In between coaching, I’m working on prepping my content for the PowerShell Conference in Asia next week.  When I work on my projects, I keep the content on the big screen to get my class to ask questions.

While working on the project in SAPIEN PowerShell Studio, I needed a way to format the date-time stamps on the internal log that I like to use when I’m coding a large project.  I noticed that what I was using was not sorting the way that I wanted it to based on the date-time information.  To fix this, I changed formats to YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.

 I took a look at the GetDateTimeFormats method of the System.DateTime object to see if I could generate this format easily.

PS C:\> (Get-Date).GetDateTimeFormats()
10/7/2016
10/7/16
10/07/16
10/07/2016
16/10/07

This produced a huge list of possibilities.  In order to use one, you need to specify the index number.

PS C:\> (Get-Date).GetDateTimeFormats()[10]
7 October, 2016

Well, there are 132 possible formats and I did not want to count so here is a simple function to help you decide which one you want to use.

Function Get-DateTimeFormat
{
    $Formats = $Date.GetDateTimeFormats()
    $Index = 0
    ForEach ($F in $Formats)
    {
        $Obj = New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
            Index = $Index
            Format = $Date.GetDateTimeFormats()[$Index]
        }
        Write-Output $Obj | Select-Object -Property Index, Format
        $Index++
    }
}

Get-DateTimeFormat



Index Format                            
----- ------                            
    0 10/7/2016                         
    1 10/7/16                           
    2 10/07/16                          
    3 10/07/2016                         
    4 16/10/07                          
    5 2016-10-07                        
    6 07-Oct-16                         
    7 Friday, October 7, 2016           
    8 October 7, 2016                   
    9 Friday, 7 October, 2016           
   10 7 October, 2016           


Simple, but effective. Mine ended up being number 93. Here is a screen shot of where I used it.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Adding a Comment to a GPO with PowerShell

As I'm writing this article, I'm also writing a customization for a PowerShell course I'm teaching next week in Phoenix.  This customization deals with Group Policy and PowerShell.  For those of you who attend my classes may already know this, but I sit their and try to ask the questions to myself that others may ask as I present the material.  I finished up my customization a few hours ago and then I realized that I did not add in how to put a comment on a GPO.  This is a feature that many Group Policy Administrators may not be aware of. This past summer I attended a presentation at TechEd on Group Policy.  One organization in the crowd had over 5,000 Group Policies.  In an environment like that, the comment section can be priceless.  I always like to write in the comment section why I created the policy so I know its purpose next week after I've completed 50 other tasks and can't remember what I did 5 minutes ago. In the Group Policy module for PowerShell V3, th

Return duplicate values from a collection with PowerShell

If you have a collection of objects and you want to remove any duplicate items, it is fairly simple. # Create a collection with duplicate values $Set1 = 1 , 1 , 2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 1 , 2   # Remove the duplicate values. $Set1 | Select-Object -Unique 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 What if you want only the duplicate values and nothing else? # Create a collection with duplicate values $Set1 = 1 , 1 , 2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 1 , 2   #Create a second collection with duplicate values removed. $Set2 = $Set1 | Select-Object -Unique   # Return only the duplicate values. ( Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $Set2 -DifferenceObject $Set1 ) . InputObject | Select-Object – Unique 1 2 This works with objects as well as numbers.  The first command creates a collection with 2 duplicates of both 1 and 2.   The second command creates another collection with the duplicates filtered out.  The Compare-Object cmdlet will first find items that are diffe

How to list all the AD LDS instances on a server

AD LDS allows you to provide directory services to applications that are free of the confines of Active Directory.  To list all the AD LDS instances on a server, follow this procedure: Log into the server in question Open a command prompt. Type dsdbutil and press Enter Type List Instances and press Enter . You will receive a list of the instance name, both the LDAP and SSL port numbers, the location of the database, and its status.