A DSL for XML in PowerShell: New-XDocument

In July of last year I wrote a PowerShell script with the goal of allowing me to generate XML from PowerShell with a simple markup that would look a little like the resulting XML ... this week I was using that script again, and had a couple of issues that made me go back and look at the source.

While I was playing with the source and tweaking things a little bit to improve the way it handles namespaces, I started playing with the idea that I could improve the syntax. At the very least, I thought, I ought to be able to do away with all those “xe” aliases…

Well, I was able to. ( new version) And what’s more, I managed to dramatically clean up the way namespaces work, and make it so that really, the only ugly part of the syntax is the initial declaration of namespaces! I’m going to start with two examples, and use them to walk you through the features

Example 1

The simplest example I could think of is to list all the files in a folder, with the file size and last modified stamp:

The output of that, when run on my formats folder, looks like this:

You can immediately see what the script does: New-XDocument (which is aliased as ‘xml’) actually generates the root xml node, so the first argument to it is the name of that node, and any other arguments become attributes … except for the script block. That script block turns into the contents of the node.

Inside the script block, PowerShell code is parsed as usual, but whenever a command that doesn’t exist is encountered, it is turned into an xml node! Pretty simple, right? Of course, if you wanted to create a node with a name that’s already taken by a PowerShell command, you can just replace file with New-XElement file, or (using aliases) xe 'file', which explicitly creates an xml node with the given name.

That’s pretty much it for our first example, so let’s look at a more complicated example, with multiple namespaces, and deeper nesting.

Example 2

This time, we’ll create an Atom document, and we’ll include some namespace extensions (including a made up one for listing my files as we did above):

There are four things you should notice, in particular:

First: the initial tag has a [XNamespace] added to it. You can specify a tag name that has a namespace by adding them together this way, or by embedding the namespace in the string like "{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}feed" instead. Either way works. This initial namespace becomes the default namespace for the document. If you don’t specify a namespace on tags later, they automatically belong to that one.

Second: when you want to add additional namespaces, you can do so with a custom prefix like: -dc ([XNamespace]"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1"), and that prefix (dc) takes on a special meaning. When you want to have a tag later on that is part of that namespace, you just prefix the tag, like dc:rights —the same way you would in XML.

Third: any number of attributes can be specified using the -name value syntax, but anything in a {scriptblock} becomes the content — and is subject to the same rules as the outer sections.

Fourth: This generates an XDocument. When you cast an XDocument to string, the xml declaration is left off, so if you want it, you need to manually add it via $XDocument.Declaration. Incidentally, XDocuments are not XMLDocuments, but they are trivially castable to them.

The output of that particular section of New-XDocument is this:

The New-XDocument script itself is on PoshCode in the Xml Module 4 along with a few interesting functions like Select-XML (which improves over the built-in by being able to ignore namespaces when you write XPath) and Remove-XmlNamespace (which was instrumental in removing namespaces for Select-Xml). There’s also a Format-Xml for pretty-printing, and a Convert-Xml for processing XSL transformations.

I’ll probably post some more examples of this in the next week or two, and I really should write some commentary about the function itself, which uses the tokenizer to discover which “commands” are really xml nodes … but for now, I’ll leave you to enjoy.

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