The Surly Admin

New Module Published: PSHTMLTools

Before I get started, just wanted to check with you that you’re ok?  It’s been a long time since I posted here and it probably came as a shock.  Work at athenahealth has been incredibly challenging and to be honest, when I get home I just want to spend time with my family and not hours MORE behind the keyboard coding!  I’ve also taken up hiking–when my back allows–and am the proud owner of a blue Tesla Model 3!  And, in a stunning turn of events, my daughter has become a teenager.  I have no idea how that happened.  That said, I got the bug this weekend after a Github contributor put in a Pull Request to my old Set-CellColor function.  I wish I could have accepted the PR, but I ended up reworking the script to squash a long standing bug.  Then I added CI/CD and Pester testing.  Ah, screw it, let’s make a module!!

Introducing PSHTMLTools

This is a module of the 3 HTML tools I use–almost exclusively–for my reporting at work.  They are designed to work with ConvertTo-HTML, and while they might work with HTML tables created from another source, it’s not their purpose.  The 3 functions, you ask?

1. Set-AlternatingRow
   • This is a simple function that will alternate between two CSS classes for each row of a table.  You supply the CSS and the classes and just tell the function what they are.
2. Set-CellColor
   • This function will take a Filter that you supply (Column4 -eq 5) and if it finds a cell in that column that matches your criteria will change its color to what you tell it to.  This is great for reports where you want to highlight when some threshold is crossed, like 90% license usage.
3. Set-GroupRowColorsByColumn
   • This will change the color of a row whenever the value of a column changes value.  Say you have a report that has 2 or 3 lines for each server, you’d group by the server name and get a different color every time the report moves on to a new server.  This one makes for especially slick looking reports.

That’s it.  I enjoyed making a full CI/CD pipeline for this module with a full suite of Pester tests and automatic publishing to PSGallery.  To install it you can simply install it from the PowerShell Gallery:

Interested in contributing? You can find the project on Github here.

February 25, 2019 Posted by Martin9700 | PowerShell - HTML Reporting | powershell html module function | 1 Comment