Create pretty reports

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In this small post I’ll quickly show you how to take almost any output from PowerShell and turn it into a presentable report and send it as an email.

The below code takes advantage of PSCustomObjects and the ability to store them inside of arrays, thus removing the issue of having multiple keys with the same name in a hash table/PSCustomObject.

$Items = Get-ChildItem C:\temp\ExampleFiles\*
$Table = @()
foreach ($Item in $Items) {
    $Output = [PSCustomObject]@{
        Mode = $Item.Mode
        LastWriteTime = $Item.LastWriteTime
        Length = $Item.Length
        Name = $Item.Name
    }
    $Table += $Output
}
$TableOutput = $Table.GetEnumerator() | Select-Object * | ConvertTo-Html -Fragment -As Table

$Body = @"
<head>
<style type='text/css'>
table {
border-collapse: collapse;
}
th {
text-align: center;
padding: 0.5em;
background-color: teal;
color:white
}
tr,td {
text-align: center;
border-bottom: .15em solid #ddd;
padding-left: 3em;
padding-right: 3em;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
$TableOutput
</body>
"@
$EmailSplat = @{
    To         = 'email@yourdomain.org'
    From       = 'email@yourdomain.org'
    Subject    = 'Example'
    Body       = $Body
    BodyAsHTML = $true
    UseSSL     = $true
    SMTPServer = 'YourSMTPServer'
}
Send-MailMessage @EmailSplat

Keep in mind that this is simply an example, you can transform, manipulate, and modify the data however you wish before you add it to the PSCustomObject.

  • Output in PowerShell
  • Report in Email