As you’ve maybe noticed, default cmdlets for PVS are returning text array and not regular .NET objects – since Powershell is object-oriented scripting language, it can be quite complicate to manipulate with the output if you want to process it automatically (and not just display on the screen).

As a temporary workaround, I wrote a function that can convert output from MCLI.exe to regular objects with properties – this should make it much easier to use it in the code.

The usage is very simple – just execute MCLI.exe with any arguments and pipe the output to the function called ConvertFrom-MCLI – you will automatically get array of objects in your output.

Function ConvertFrom-MCLI {

    Begin {
        [array]$PvsLines = @()
    }

    Process {
        $PvsLines += $_
    }

    End {
        [array]$ResultArray = @()
        :NextLine ForEach ($Line in $PvsLines) {
            If ($Line.Length -eq 0) {Continue}
            If ($Line[0] -eq " " -or $Line.StartsWith("Record #")) {
                # New object reference
                If ($Line.StartsWith("Record #")) {
                    [Object]$Script:PvsObject = New-Object PSObject
                    $ResultArray += $Script:PvsObject
                    Continue NextLine
                } ElseIf ($Script:PvsObject -is [Object]) {
                    $ItemName = $([System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex]::Replace($Line.Substring(0, $Line.IndexOf(":")),"[^1-9a-zA-Z_]",""))
                    $ItemValue = $($Line.Substring($Line.IndexOf(":") + 2))
                    $Script:PvsObject | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name $ItemName -Value $ItemValue
                }
            }
        }
        Write-Host "Retrieved $($ResultArray.Count) objects"
        Return $ResultArray
    }
}
Examples

1.) Retrieve device name & MAC address:

& 'C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Services\MCLI.exe' get DeviceInfo | ConvertFrom-Mcli | Select deviceName, DeviceMac

2.) Retrieve all target devices with more than 0 retries:

& 'C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Services\MCLI.exe' get DeviceInfo | ConvertFrom-Mcli | Where {$_.Status -gt0}

3.) Display number of days since domain account was created:

$Devices = & 'C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Services\MCLI.exe' get DeviceInfo | ConvertFrom-MCLI
ForEach ($Devicein$Devices) { Write-Host"$($Device.deviceName): "-NoNewlineWrite-Host $([Math]::Round($($(Get-Date) - [datetime]$Device.domainTimeCreated).TotalDays)) }

If you are looking for a specific example, feel free to ask in comments.

Each returning object will have automatically all properties assigned – the only downside at the moment is the fact that each property is [String] type – but you can always override this default type if needed (see example no. 3 – I’m specifying that domainTimeCreated is [DateTime]).

You can download the function here

 

Martin Zugec