How to Combine and split values by delimiter? - powershell

Question

I have a script that has a switch, -Add, allowing the addition of 1 role and 1 member (into that role) in a database at a time.
PS> script1.ps1 -Add Database1 role1 member1
PS> script1.ps1 -Add Database1 role1 member2
PS> script1.ps1 -Add Database1 role2 memberx
PS> script1.ps1 -Add Database1 role3
PS> script1.ps1 -Add Database1 role4 membery
It wont be practical to have to run that script everytime if there are more than 1 member or 1 roles/members to add a time. hence, i'd like to update my script with bulk addition of roles/members at once, which would be helpful especially for a TFS use case, in which the user wont have to create multiple releases just to add a couple roles/members for the same database.
i am thinking of implementing a delimiter split, in which for every semicolon, that indicates the start of a new role, and any comma delimited members, all belong to one role unless a semicolon follows (not necessary if its the end of the input, unless it would be hard to achieve something like that with regex?)
pseudocode:
$RoleInput.Split(";") | ForEach {
$role = "$_";
$MemberInput.Split(",") | ForEach {
$member = "$_";
#-Add $DBName $role $member
}
}
ultimately, i would like to achieve similar to the following:
PS> script1.ps1 -Add Database1 role1;role2;role3;role4 member1,member2;memberx;;membery
this means that for role1, member1 and member2 would be added
for role2, memberx is added, for role3, no member is added, and for role 4, membery is added
how would i achieve this correctly with regex to account for whitespaces, and end of input?

Answer 1

Save roles and members in a CSV
"Role","Members"
"role1","member1;member2"
"role2",
"role3","memberX"
then load the CSV using Import-Csv, split the member list at the chosen secondary delimiter (semicolons in the example above), and call your script with those arguments.
Import-Csv 'input.csv' | ForEach-Object {
$role = $_.Role
if ($_.Members) {
$_.Members -split ';' | ForEach-Object { & script1.ps1 -Add $role $_ }
} else {
& script1.ps1 -Add $role
}
}
If you can modify the parameters of your script you could change them to something like this:
[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
[Parameter(ParameterSetName='add', Mandatory=$true)]
[Switch]$Add,
[Parameter(ParameterSetName='add', Mandatory=$true)]
[String]$Role,
[Parameter(ParameterSetName='add', Mandatory=$false)]
[String[]]$Members = #()
)
so that the script accepts a list of members via a named parameter (you also need to adjust how the members are processed in the script, of course), and then call it like this:
Import-Csv 'input.csv' | ForEach-Object {
$params = #{'Role' = $_.Role}
if ($_.Members) { $params['Member'] = $_.Members -split ';' }
& script.ps1 -Add #params
}
This second example uses splatting for passing the parameters to the script.