Is there a supported way for users to create type accelerators? #5940
Description
Consider the following enum that resides in a deeply-nested namespace:
Add-Type @'
namespace Some { namespace Deeply { namespace NestedNamespace {
public enum AnEnum {
One = 1,
Two,
Three,
Four
}
}
}
}
'@"One" can be accessed from the enum using the fully-qualified type as follows:
[Some.Deeply.NestedNamespace.AnEnum]::OneThe length of the namespace prefixes make use of the enum awkward. PowerShell involving such enums quickly becomes dominated by repetition of Some.Deeply.NestedNamespace. Here is a snippet that demostrates this. (I copied this from a current project, and just changed the token names.):
if
(
$PSCmdlet.ParameterSetName -ne 'parameterSetA' -and
$ParamA -notin [Some.Deeply.NestedNamespace.AnEnum]::One,[Some.Deeply.NestedNamespace.AnEnum]::Two
)
{
$someVar= @{
[Some.Deeply.NestedNamespace.AnEnum]::Three = [System.Exception]::new('message.')
[Some.Deeply.NestedNamespace.AnEnum]::Four= [System.Management.Automation.ErrorRecord]::new(
[System.Exception]::new('message.'),
'Error',
[System.Management.Automation.ErrorCategory]::OperationStopped,
$null
)
}.$ParamA
}Ideally, this could be rewritten making use of type accelerators as follows:
if
(
$PSCmdlet.ParameterSetName -ne 'parameterSetA' -and
$ParamA -notin [anenum]::One,[anenum]::Two
)
{
$someVar= @{
[anenum]::Three = [exception]::new('message.')
[anenum]::Four= [errorrecord]::new(
[System.Exception]::new('message.'),
'Error',
[errorcategory]::OperationStopped,
$null
)
}.$ParamA
}Add-TypeAccelerator.ps1 is available from gallery. It looks like the API used to add custom type accelerators was changed from PowerShell 2 to 3 and again from PowerShell 4 to 5. This makes me wonder the following:
- Is there a supported way for users to create type accelerators?
- Is there some other way to reduce namespace repetition when referring to types?