Convert XML to PSObject

Question

Note: I'm using ConvertTo-XML and cannot use Export-Clixml:

I create a simple PSObject:

$a = New-Object PSObject -Property @{     Name='New'     Server = $null     Database = $null     UserName = $null     Password = $null } 

I then convert it into XML using ConvertTo-XML:

$b = $a | Convertto-XML -NoTypeInformation 

The XML looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <Objects>   <Object>     <Property Name="Password" />     <Property Name="Name">New</Property>     <Property Name="Server" />     <Property Name="UserName" />     <Property Name="Database" />   </Object> </Objects> 

I'm having trouble figuring out the dot notation or XPath query to extract the attributes/elements and convert $b back to the original PSObject.

Answer 1

You can do this pretty easily with XPath. Although PowerShell usually makes working with XML pretty simple, in this case I think the format using strictly PowerShell syntax would be pretty gross.

filter XmlProperty([String]$Property) {     $_.SelectSingleNode("/Objects/Object/Property[@Name='$Property']").InnerText }  $Name = $b | Xmlproperty Name $Server = $b | XmlProperty Server # etc... 

EDIT: To generically do this for an XML document that contains one or more Object elements, you can do something like this:

function ConvertFrom-Xml($XML) {     foreach ($Object in @($XML.Objects.Object)) {         $PSObject = New-Object PSObject         foreach ($Property in @($Object.Property)) {             $PSObject | Add-Member NoteProperty $Property.Name $Property.InnerText         }         $PSObject     } }  ConvertFrom-Xml $b