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Recording a Data in a Log

I’m wrapping up another PowerShell class right now in Fort Wayne, IN.  At the end of my classes, I like to do a “Project Day”.  I invite my class to do a project for themselves in our test environment so I can coach them.  In between coaching, I’m working on prepping my content for the PowerShell Conference in Asia next week.  When I work on my projects, I keep the content on the big screen to get my class to ask questions.

While working on the project in SAPIEN PowerShell Studio, I needed a way to format the date-time stamps on the internal log that I like to use when I’m coding a large project.  I noticed that what I was using was not sorting the way that I wanted it to based on the date-time information.  To fix this, I changed formats to YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.

 I took a look at the GetDateTimeFormats method of the System.DateTime object to see if I could generate this format easily.

PS C:\> (Get-Date).GetDateTimeFormats()
10/7/2016
10/7/16
10/07/16
10/07/2016
16/10/07

This produced a huge list of possibilities.  In order to use one, you need to specify the index number.

PS C:\> (Get-Date).GetDateTimeFormats()[10]
7 October, 2016

Well, there are 132 possible formats and I did not want to count so here is a simple function to help you decide which one you want to use.

Function Get-DateTimeFormat
{
    $Formats = $Date.GetDateTimeFormats()
    $Index = 0
    ForEach ($F in $Formats)
    {
        $Obj = New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
            Index = $Index
            Format = $Date.GetDateTimeFormats()[$Index]
        }
        Write-Output $Obj | Select-Object -Property Index, Format
        $Index++
    }
}

Get-DateTimeFormat



Index Format                            
----- ------                            
    0 10/7/2016                         
    1 10/7/16                           
    2 10/07/16                          
    3 10/07/2016                         
    4 16/10/07                          
    5 2016-10-07                        
    6 07-Oct-16                         
    7 Friday, October 7, 2016           
    8 October 7, 2016                   
    9 Friday, 7 October, 2016           
   10 7 October, 2016           


Simple, but effective. Mine ended up being number 93. Here is a screen shot of where I used it.


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