Category: Quick Tips

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PowerShell Quick Tips

Creating a Discord Webhook in a few lines of PowerShell

Discord Web Hooks are easier than you’d think. It uses a regular `HTTP` web request .

Step1: Creating your webhook url

Go to: Server Settings -> Integrations -> View Webhooks
Then click create webhook.

Choose a name, the channel, then copy webhook url

Step2: Invoke-RestMethod

$webhookUri = 'https://discord.com/api/YourWebhookUrlHere'

$Body = @{
  'username' = 'Nomad'
  'content' = 'https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Nomad'
}
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $webhookUri -Method 'post' -Body $Body

Success!

Docs

There are optional webhook arguments to customize the output: https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/webhook#execute-webhook

Comparison with curl

I tried making curl easier to read by splitting content, and pipe so that you don’t have to manually escape Json

$Json = @{ 'username' = 'Nomad'; 'content' = 'https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Nomad' } | ConvertTo-Json -Compress

$Json | curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '@-' $webhookUri

Categories
Command Line PowerShell Quick Tips References And Cheat Sheets

Easy way to cache results on the Command Line | Power Shell Tip

Sometimes you’ll need to run a command with the same input with different logic.
This can be a hassle using a slow command like Get-ADUser or Get-ChildItem on a lot of files like ~ (Home) with -Depth / -Recurse

ls ~ -Depth 4 | Format-Table Name

PowerShell 7.0+

Powershell 7 added the Ternary Operator, and several operators for handling $null values.

All of these examples will only run Get-ChildItem the first time. Any future calls are cached.

Null-Coalesce ??= Assignment Operator

This is my favorite on the Command line. The RHS (Right Hand Side) skips evaluation if the left side is not $null

$AllFiles ??= ls ~ -Depth 4

Using the Null-Coalesce ?? Operator

$AllFiles = $AllFiles ?? ( ls ~ -Depth 4  )

Ternary Operator ? whenTrue : WhenFalse

$allFiles = $allFiles ? $allFiles : ( ls ~ -Depth 4 )

Windows PowerShell and Powershell < 7

Windows Powershell can achieve the same effect with an if statement

if(! $AllFiles) { $AllFiles = ls ~ -Depth 4 }
Categories
Power BI Power Query Quick Tips

Preserving Types When using “Add Custom Column” in Power Query

The default UI sets your column to type any.

You can use the optional argument of Table.AddColumn to set it to number
Or you can declare your function’s return type

Why doesn’t the original [Num] * 2 work?

Powerquery does not know what type will be returned by your function. That’s because each is by definition a function that returns type any

See More

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Command Line Getting-Started PowerShell Pwsh7+ Quick Tips What's New

PowerShell : Prefixing lines with the Pipe operator |

There’s a lot of ways to use line continuations in Windows Powershell without backticks . Powershell added a new one, the | pipe operator. It’s cleaner to read, and makes it easier to insert, delete, or toggle comments on the console.

Now you can write:

# Powershell
ls | sort Length
| Select -First 10
| ft Name, Length

Instead of piping on line endings

# Windows Powershell
ls | sort Length |
Select -First 10 |
ft Name, Length

# or
ls | sort Length | Select -First 10 | ft Name, Length
Categories
Quick Tips Snippets SQL

Generating Random Numbers in SQL

To generate random integers from min to max, including min and max

SELECT FLOOR( RAND()*( Max - Min + 1 )) + Min;

Example: To create a random integer between 5 and 10

SELECT FLOOR( RAND()*( 10 - 5 + 1 )) + 5;
Categories
PowerShell Quick Tips Regex

Using Case-Sensitive Regular expressions in PowerShell – Tips

Find-Member using a case-insensitive Regex

Say you want to find functions that uses parameters named like:
-AsString, -AsHashTable, or -AsByteStream

Using Find-Member makes it easy.

> Find-Member -Name 'As*'

That’s close, but I want it to start with a capital letter, to skip matches like:
Assembly or Asin

Converting Like to a Regex

The -like pattern As* is the same as the regex ^As
To start with a capital letter you could use: ^As[A-Z]

Disabling Case-Sensitive matches

Because PowerShell defaults to case-insensitive matches
You need to remove the i insensitive flag using the syntax (?-i)

Solution

> Find-Member -Name '(?-i)^As[A-Z]' -RegularExpression

The final pattern is (?-i)^As[A-Z]
Making it case-sensitive narrowed down the matches from 113 to 43 !

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Power BI Quick Tips

Tip: Controlling a Column’s “Summarize By” Type in Power BI

The Model view allows you to set a global default “Summarize By” type for every column.
You still have the ability to override the aggregation type per-visual in Report view