I really enjoy Jeffery Hicks’s Prof. PowerShell column.  In two of his recent columns (Perfect Properties and Label Me Perfect), Jeffery goes in to “calculated properties”.   A calculated property is a hashtable passed to the Select-Object or Format-* cmdlets as one of the properties to return.

Here is an example from Label Me Perfect:

PS C:> get-wmiobject Win32_logicaldisk -filter “drivetype=3” -computer "mycompany-dc01" | Format-table DeviceID,VolumeName, @{label=“Size(MB)";Expression={$.Size/1mb -as [int]}}, @{label="Free(MB)";Expression={$_.FreeSpace/1MB -as [int]}}, @{label=“PercentFree”;Expression={ “{0:P2}” -f (($.FreeSpace/1MB)/($_.Size/1MB))}} -autosize

That is a whopper to type at the command line or to try to read in a script.

In order to increase readability and resuse, you can assign those hash tables to a variable and use that variable as one of the parameters to Select-Object or one of the Format-* cmdlets.

PS C:> $Size = @{label=“Size(MB)";Expression={$.Size/1mb -as [int]}} PS C:> $FreeMB = @{label=“Free(MB)";Expression={$.FreeSpace/1MB -as [int]}} PS C:> $PercentFree = @{label=“PercentFree”;Expression={"{0:P2}” -f (($.FreeSpace/1MB)/($.Size/1MB))}}

PS C:> get-wmiobject Win32_logicaldisk -filter “drivetype=3” -computer "mycompany-dc01" | Format-table DeviceID,VolumeName, $Size, $FreeMB, $PercentFree -autosize

This makes it a bit easier to read, and also makes those hash tables available for further use in additional statements without needing to retype them.

 

PSMDTAG: FAQ: Calculated Properties