PowerShell Pipeline

Enhance Your Reporting Using HTML in PowerShell

Spit out a more pleasant looking report using this PowerShell method.

• By Boe Prox
• 01/06/2016

In our day-to-day activities of working with PowerShell, it is likely that you have been asked to generate a report of some kind and provide that to your boss, or even your boss's boss. Either way, the common approach to this might be to send the output to a file by means of a text file or CSV file. While there is nothing necessarily wrong with this at all, sometimes it is nice to provide a richer report to make the report more presentable to the viewer.

Building an HTML report can be as simple as taking your output and sending it to the ConvertTo-HTML cmdlet and then sending that to a file or embedding it into an email that is sent out.

You might be asking, is it really that simple? Sure it is! Just watch below.

Get-Service | ConvertTo-HTML | Out-File Services.html

  Invoke-Item Services.html .

This is just a small snapshot of the actual report, but you can see that when I use Invoke-Item, it will open up the file using the default application, if applicable. What we have is an HTML report showing all of the services on my system. Of course, I need to make some adjustments as a few of the properties flatten down to a typename instead of the actual data that we need. That is simply a matter of selecting the right properties and then formatting the data within the property so it looks nicer.

Get-Service | Select Name, DisplayName, Status, @{L='RequiredServices';E={$_.RequiredServices  -join '; '}}|

  ConvertTo-Html | Out-File Services.html

Invoke-Item Services.html 

That works and definitely makes it a little more readable. Note that this is using a table by default. If we wanted a list view we can use the –As List parameter in ConvertTo-HTML to make it look more like a list.

Get-Service | Select Name, DisplayName, Status, @{L='RequiredServices';E={$_.RequiredServices  -join '; '}}|

  ConvertTo-Html -As List | Out-File Services.html

Invoke-Item Services.html 

Personally, I am more into using tables to display data, but there are always places to use a list.

So far these have been the simplest of reports that we have been building with just showing off the data. But there is more to the cmdlet than what I have shown so far. You can add content at the end of the HTML report and even write your own HTML code and create some amazing reports. For instance, I will add a title and a footer at the end showing when and where this report was created.

$Services = Get-Service | Select Name, DisplayName, Status, @{L='RequiredServices';E={$_.RequiredServices  -join '; '}}  | Select -first 5

  $Report = 'ServicesReport.html'

  $pre = @"

  <div style='margin:  0px auto; BACKGROUND-COLOR:Black;Color:White;font-weight:bold;FONT-SIZE:  16pt;TEXT-ALIGN: center;'>

  $Env:Computername  Services Report

  </div>    

  "@ 

  $post = "<BR><i>Report generated on $((Get-Date).ToString()) from $($Env:Computername)</i>"

  $Services | ConvertTo-HTML -PreContent  $pre -PostContent  $post |  Out-file $Report

Invoke-Item $Report 

As you probably have noticed, I first gathered my services (only 10 this time to better show everything off) and then used some HTML code to create my title and also my post content footer. ConvertTo-HTML has parameters (-Pre and -Post) which allow me to place these snippets in their proper location on the report.

With that, we have a nice looking report that can be used to show not only the system and services, but also provides a footer at the bottom to show where the report came from as well as when it was created. This is useful if we have a scheduled job running to generate these reports.

While this is already a great start to reports and will definitely make a better looking report than just a text file, but stay tuned for my next article where we build on what we have done here to create some truly great reports!