I have a working call to a rest service using Invoke-RestMethod -Uri https://...
. The call's result, in JSON
, can be piped the data to Format-Table -Property ...
and data is shown.
But when Select-Object -Property ...
is used after the invoke with the same parameters, the PSObject
has the columns but no data for them. If I use a different webservice the call will work.
What could be causing the PSObject
to not show any values?
Working Example on public rest web services
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1 |
Select-Object -Property title
Result
@{title=delectus aut autem}
New Failure Different API
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri https://cat-fact.herokuapp.com/facts | Select-Object -Property text
You've stumbled upon an unholy combination of two PowerShell oddities when converting JSON arrays:
Invoke-RestMethod
and ConvertFrom-Json
send converted-from-JSON arrays as a whole through the pipeline, instead of element by element, as usual:
Note: In PowerShell (Core) 7.0, ConvertFrom-Json
's behavior was changed to align with the usual enumeration-of-elements behavior, and a -NoEnumerate
switch was added as an opt-in to the old behavior. For the discussion that led to this change, see GitHub issue #3424.
However, as of this writing (PowerShell (Core 7.4.1) Invoke-RestMethod
still exhibits this unexpected behavior; GitHub issue #15280 aims to change that.
Select-Object
does not perform member-access enumeration, so it looks for the specified property (e.g., text
) directly on the array, where it doesn't exist.
To demonstrate the problem with a simple example:
# Windows PowerShell only:
# Because ConvertFrom-Json sends an *array* (of 2 custom objects) through
# the pipeline, Select-Object looks for property .text on the *array* -
# and can't find it.
# The same applies to Invoke-RestMethod (also still in
# PowerShell (Core) as of v7.2)
PS> ConvertFrom-Json '[{ "text": "a" }, { "text": "b" }]' | Select-Object text
text
----
# NO VALUES
A simple workaround is to enclose the ConvertFrom-Json
/ Invoke-RestMethod
call in (...)
, which forces enumeration of the array, causing Select-Object
to work as expected.:
# (...) forces enumeration
PS> (ConvertFrom-Json '[{ "text": "a" }, { "text": "b" }]') | Select-Object text
text
----
a
b
Note that a command such as Select-Object -Property text
(without -ExpandProperty
) still output custom objects that have a .text
property, not the .text
property values.
If all you're interested in is property values, the solution is simpler, because you can use the above-mentioned member-access enumeration directly on the array:
# Using .<propName> on an array (collection) implicitly returns the
# property values from the *elements* of that collection (member-access enumeration).
PS> (ConvertFrom-Json '[{ "text": "a" }, { "text": "b" }]').text
a
b
Note how the output now has no text
header, because it is mere string values that are being output, not custom objects.