What's the proper way to write custom functions and pass them into the dashboard?

Universal Dashboard Universal Dashboard Help
1

My apologies for the newbie-ish question; I just stumbled on to Powershell Universal Dashboard yesterday and first blush seems pretty cool!

I am trying to use this as a lightweight status display for a series of licensing servers that we have. As such, I need to call out to a program outside of Powershell, chop up the output, and drop it into the dashboard.

My problems are basically these:

  1. I have a custom function that returns the data I want but I cannot seem to use it inside of the dashboard. I have gotten external variables to work with New-UDDEndpointIntialization -Variable but using this for a function doesnā€™t seem to work. Hereā€™s a little sample I whipped up that fails miserably:

function Test-Function {
Return 1
}

$Dashboard = New-UDDashboard -Title ā€œThis is a little testā€ -Content {
New-UDEndpointInitialization -Function ā€œTest-Functionā€
New-UDCard -Title ā€œThe Titleā€ -Endpoint {Test-Function}
}
Start-UDDashboard -Port 80 -Dashboard $Dashboard -AutoReload

What am I doing wrong?

I am getting something like this inside the card:

The term ā€˜Test-Functionā€™ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

  1. From a higher level, I am looking for advice on approaches to bringing this information to life in PUD. I started out setting up an array of all of my variables for each license service in an array and then building out the dashboard. I ran into problems getting data into the dashboard from that powershell so re-doubled effort on reading the documentation and decided to make a usable function that I could call from within the dashboard elements and spit out some text. If you had to call out to a program, parse and slice the returned data, to display within UD (and repeat that same process multiple times), how would you approach it?

Thanks for listening to the newb questions!

ā€“mjn

P.S. The documentation is great and looks polished but I think it fails because it does not address most functionality in context. For example, I found the New-UDEndpointInitialization documentation and have tried calling that inside and outside of the dashboard Iā€™m creating, and I have tried calling the initialized function I am using multiple ways; I still donā€™t truly know what the correct way might be in either case.

2

Sorry that the documentation is a bit lacking.Iā€™m always trying to improve it so I guess Iā€™ll have to revisit this tid bit.

New-UDEndpointInitiailization returns an object that you will want to pass to the -EndpointInitialization parameter for New-UDDashboard.

function Test-Function {
Return 1
}

$EI = New-UDEndpointInitialization -Function ā€œTest-Functionā€
$Dashboard = New-UDDashboard -Title ā€œThis is a little testā€ -Content {

New-UDCard -Title ā€œThe Titleā€ -Endpoint {Test-Function}
} -EndpointInitialization $EI
Start-UDDashboard -Port 80 -Dashboard $Dashboard -AutoReload

You should be able to do the same for your variables.

$MyVariable = 1
$MyVariable2 = 2
$EI = New-UDEndpointInitialization -Variable @('MyVariable', 'MyVariable2')
$Dashboard = New-UDDashboard -Title ā€œThis is a little testā€ -Content {

New-UDCard -Title ā€œThe Titleā€ -Endpoint {$MyVariable}
New-UDCard -Title ā€œThe Titleā€ -Endpoint {$MyVariable2}
} -EndpointInitialization $EI
Start-UDDashboard -Port 80 -Dashboard $Dashboard -AutoReload
3 Likes
3

Wonderfully complete and quick reply, Adam! Thank you so much!

4

I would be happy to contribute some examples too. Presumably thatā€™s just a pull request to the docs project?

Thanks for the work on this cool and really useful tool!

5

Yeah sure thing! And if you are feeling up to it the docs repo is here: https://github.com/adamdriscoll/universal-dashboard-documentation/

6

I had this issue the other day when trying to wrap my head around it. I was able to dig through some of your codebase and found some examples that showed it being used like this.

Documentation is a hard thing to keep accurate and up-to-date, especially on such a large module.

7

Hi,
Is the syntax the same if the function would return a string-value?
as when i change the returnvalue to ā€˜Test 1ā€™, nothing is returned in the GUI

8

Sorry to hijack this thread.

@adam - I do not have any issue declaring the variable independently to EndpointInitialization, but not through a foreach object. How do you pass variable from a foreach object? Something like below.

Get-Content "xxxxx" | Foreach-Object {
    $a = $_.Split(",")[0]
    $b = xxxx

    if ($a -eq $b) {

      $var = True
    }
}
$init = New-UDEndpointInitialization -Variable @("var")

I checked all var in the foreach to a UDcard, output are correct. I hope you can enlighten me on how to correctly do this. Thanks!

UPDATE:
Let me be a little clear, with a simple string it worked. What I am trying to achieve is to ensure condition of ā€œ$userā€ or ā€œ$ClaimsPrincipal.Identity.Nameā€ is matching with $a. I was able to run and display all these var in a UDcard. But EndpointInit did not capture the var.

We do not have the a dedicated ADgroup for users, so I need to load these users manually with their primarySID or Name and cross-check with their authentication sessions. Any advise?

9

I have got it working using this.

if ($ClaimsPrincipal.Identity.Name -eq $SID)