Last Wednesday I had the privilege to present Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE) at the Milwaukee Sitecore Meetup. During my presentation, I demonstrated how easy it is to add, execute and reuse PowerShell scripts in SPE, and I showcased version 3.0 of SPE on Sitecore XP 8.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time before showing how one can go about creating a custom commandlet in SPE, and hope to make it up to everyone by sharing the commandlet I wrote for the presentation in this post.

I wrote the following commandlet to convert an Item into an Item Bucket in Sitecore:

using System;
using System.Management.Automation;

using Sitecore.Data.Items;
using Sitecore.Shell.Framework.Commands;

using Cognifide.PowerShell.Commandlets;
using Cognifide.PowerShell.Commandlets.Interactive.Messages;

namespace Sitecore.Sandbox.SPE.Commandlets.Buckets
{
    [Cmdlet(VerbsData.ConvertTo, "Bucket"), OutputType(new Type[] { typeof(Item) })]
    public class ConvertToBucketCommand : BaseItemCommand
    {
        protected override void ProcessItem(Item item)
        {
            try
            {
                PutMessage(new ShellCommandInItemContextMessage(item, "item:bucket"));   
            }
            catch (Exception exception)
            {
                WriteError(new ErrorRecord(exception, "sitecore_new_bucket_error", ErrorCategory.NotSpecified, Item));
            }

            WriteItem(Item);
        }
    }
}

The above commandlet implements the ProcessItem() method — this method is declared abstract in one of the ancestor classes of the class above — and leverages the framework of SPE to invoke a Sheer UI command to bucket the Item passed to the method — one of the ancestor classes of this class passes the Item to be processed.

The above highlights how in SPE we are employing the Template method pattern for many “out of the box” commandlets. This involves inheriting from an abstract base class — Cognifide.PowerShell.Commandlets.BaseItemCommand in Cognifide.PowerShell.dll (this assembly comes with the SPE module) is an example of one of these base classes — and implementing methods that are defined as abstract. The parent or an ancestor class will do the brunt of the work behind the scenes, and use your method implementation for specifics.

As a side note, we also provide method hooks as well — these are virtual methods defined on a base or ancestor class — which you can override to change how they work to meet your particular needs.

I then wired the above up using a Sitecore include configuration file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <powershell>
      <commandlets>
        <add Name="Custom Bucket Commandlets" type="*, Sitecore.Sandbox.SPE" />
      </commandlets>
    </powershell>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

I deployed the above to my Sitecore instance; loaded up the Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) in SPE; and saw that my commandlet was registered using the Control-Space shortcut key:

Let’s take this for a spin. Let’s convert the Home Item into an Item Bucket:

Here’s my script to do that:

I clicked the execute button, and then got this confirmation dialog:

I then clicked the “Ok” button and was immediately presented with this dialog:

As you can see it worked! The Home Item in my content tree is now an Item Bucket:

If you have any thoughts on this or ideas for other custom commandlets for SPE, please share in a comment.

If you would like to watch the Milwaukee Sitecore Meetup presentation where I showcased Sitecore PowerShell Extensions — and as a bonus you’ll also get to see some real-life application of SPE from Adam Brauer, Senior Product Engineer at Active Commerce, in this presentation as well — it has been recorded for posterity, and you can watch it here:

Until next time, stay curious, keep experimenting, and let’s keep on sharing all the Sitecore things!