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Some work on making Argument Completers for PowerShell cmdlets (like those from VMware PowerCLI)

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Argument Completers for some PowerShell module cmdlets

A collection of some PowerShell argument completers for various cmdlets from some PowerShell modules:

Argument Completer Script Description PSGallery Info
Register-VNActiveDirectoryArgumentCompleter.ps1 Completers for Microsoft's ActiveDirectory PowerShell module Latest Version Downloads
Register-VNAWSArgumentCompleter.ps1 Completers for some of the AWS PowerShell modules AWS.Tools.*, and the monolithic AWSPowerShell* Latest Version Downloads
Register-VNVMwarePowerCLIArgumentCompleter.ps1 Completers for VMware PowerShell module VMware.PowerCLI Latest Version Downloads

Contents:

What is Argument Completing?

Background: PowerShell argument completers are a way to enable tab-completion of cmdlet parameter values. These can be from static sources, live sources -- whatever you can imagine. Here are some examples of argument completing for a few VMware PowerCLI cmdlets' parameters:

Examples of Argument Completers for cmdlets from VMware.PowerCLI

Getting Started

The docs for this project have the information about getting started with using argument completers. Check them out.

Deeper Info

One can use a scriptblock of goodness in order to generate the completion results. So, for example:

## with a proper argument completer for the -Name parameter, the following cycles through VMs whose name match the given string, live, from the given virtual infrastructure
Get-VM -Name matt<tab>

By registering an argument completer scriptblock for a particular cmdlet and parameter, at tab-completion time, that completer generates a list of completion results (assuming any matches), through which the user can subsequently cycle via further Tab-ing. The workflow:

  • register argument completer scriptblock for a cmdlet/parameter pair (say, by runnig a script that has argument completers in it, and that registers them for cmdlet/parameter pairs)
  • for a registered argument completer, the argument scriptblock is executed one time for the first press of the Tab key, creating a list of completion results (if any)
  • each subsequent press of Tab cycles through the list of completions results (assuming that there is more than one)
  • one can also see the whole list of completion results, assuming they are in an environment that supports such things, like in something with IntelliSense, or in a PowerShell session with the PSReadline module loaded

A bit deeper explanation on the behavior resides at https://github.com/mtboren/PowerCLIFeedback/blob/master/PowerCLISuggestions.md in the "Support Natural PowerShell Interactive Behavior" section

For a bit more information about PowerShell argument completers (though there is not extensive official documentation on argument completers themselves to be found, yet), see Register-ArgumentCompleter

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Some work on making Argument Completers for PowerShell cmdlets (like those from VMware PowerCLI)

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