Iterate through XML nodes / objects and pass to variables in Powershell - powershell

Question

I'd be wanting to iterate through a set of XML and then pass those to variables which can be printed.
Here is an example of the data:
<applications>
<size>75</size>
<application>
<name>Applications 1</name>
<path>/Applications/Utilities/Application 1</path>
<version>10.14</version>
</application>
<application>
<name>Application 2</name>
<path>/Applications/Utilities/Application 2</path>
<version>6.3.9</version>
</application>
</applications
I've looked at using ForEach-Object when trying to output it but to no avail.
[string]$applicationProperties = $API.applications.application| ForEach-Object {
$_.name
$_.path
$_.version
}
This works but puts them all on one line, I'd like them so they print on individual lines but I couldn't prefix the $_ variable. I'm new to POSH as you can tell.
e.g. so I'd like to have name/path/version data saved to variables
[string]$applicationProperties = $API.applications.application | ForEach-Object {
[string]$name_var = $_.name
[string]$path_var = $_.path
[string]$version_var = $_.variable
}
This gives me one "application", but not all the possible objects. Also mentions that even when I'm putting down $name_var it's not accessing that variable? Do I need to do something to access that variable?
Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

When you assign the output from ForEach-Object to [string]$applicationProperties, you're forcing PowerShell to convert all the strings into a single string because of the cast to [string].
What you'll want to do is create a new object for each application node that you're iterating over:
$appInformation = $API.applications.application | ForEach-Object {
# Create a new custom objects with the values from the XML nodes
[pscustomobject]#{
Name = $_.name
Path = $_.path
Version = $_.version
}
}
Now $appInformation will contain an array of objects each with a Name, Path and Version property. You can then further use and/or manipulate these objects in your scripts rather than just having a bunch of strings:
$appInformation |ForEach-Object {
Write-Host "Here is the version of application '$($_.Name)': $($_.Version)"
}
If you want to see them printed in the console with each property value on a separate line just pipe the array to Format-List:
$appInformation |Format-List