How to use PS calculated properties to collate data into a cell? - powershell

Question

I'm stumped on this one. I have a PS custom object with strings only and I want to build a report where I'm outputting strings of data into a new pipeline output object.
$myObjectTable |
Select-Object #{
n = "OldData";
e = {
$_ | Select-Object name, *_old | Format-List | Out-String
}
},
#{
n = "NewData";
e = {
$_ | Select-Object name, *_new | Format-List | Out-String
}
}
Running this produces blank output.
I tried running the code above with just the $_ object in the expressions, but I only got ... as the output. Wrapping the expressions in parenthesis did not change the output.

Answer 1

The ... as property value means that the value is either a multi-line string or it just didn't fit in a tabular format. See Using Format commands to change output view more details.
You can fix those empty lines added by Out-String using Trim. Then if you want to properly display this object having multi-line property values, Format-Table -Wrap will be needed.
Here is a little example:
[pscustomobject]#{
Name = 'foo'
Something_Old = 123
Something_New = 456
} | ForEach-Object {
[pscustomobject]#{
OldData = $_ | Format-List name, *_old | Out-String | ForEach-Object Trim
NewData = $_ | Format-List name, *_new | Out-String | ForEach-Object Trim
}
} | Format-Table -Wrap
Resulting object would become:
OldData NewData
------- -------
Name : foo Name : foo
Something_Old : 123 Something_New : 456