Last Wednesday I had the opportunity of presenting Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE) at the Milwaukee Sitecore Meetup. During this presentation, I demonstrated how quickly and easily one can add, execute and reuse PowerShell scripts in SPE, and I did this using version 3.0 of SPE on Sitecore XP 8.

During one segment of the presentation, I shared how one can seamlessly add scripts to the SPE Toolbox — a repository of utility scripts if you will — and used the following script when showing this:

<#
    .NAME
        Expand tokens in all content items
 
    .SYNOPSIS
        Expand tokens in all fields in all content items
    .NOTES
        Mike Reynolds
#>
 
$items = Get-ChildItem -Path "master:\sitecore\content" -Recurse
$items | ForEach-Object { $_.Fields.ReadAll() }
$items |  Expand-Token
Close-Window

The script above grabs all descendant Items under /sitecore/content/; iterates over them to ensure all field values are available — the ReadAll() method on the FieldCollection instance will ensure values from fields on the Item’s template’s Standard Values Item are pulled in for processing; and sends in these Items into the Expand-Token commandlet which comes “out of the box” with SPE.

The script also closes the processing dialog.

I then saved the above script into my Toolbox library in my SPE module:

Let’s try this out. Let’s find some Items with tokens in some fields. It looks like the Home Item has some:

Here’s another Item that also has tokens:

Let’s go to the SPE Toolbox, and click on our Toolbox utility:

As you can see the tokens were expanded on the Home Item:

Tokens were also expanded on the descendant Item:

If you have any thoughts and/or suggestions on this, or have ideas for other SPE Toolbox scripts, please drop a comment.

If you would like to watch the Milwaukee Sitecore Meetup presentation where I showed the above — you’ll also get to see some epic Sitecore PowerShell Extensions stuff from Adam Brauer, Senior Product Engineer at Active Commerce, in this presentation as well — have a look below:

If you would like to see another example of adding a script to the SPE Toolbox, please see my previous post on this subject.

Until next time, have a scriptaculous day!