We’re back once more to continue building a Crescendo module around the GitHub command line tool gh.exe. You’ve seen how I approach building a PowerShell and the questions and decisions that come up. Now that I’ve built a few more Crescendo commands, I realize I can begin copying and pasting. Some of the commands I have in mind, I think, will be very similar. Plus, I have my VSCode Crescendo command snippet.

As I was reviewing my build.ps1 script, I realized it was going to grow out of control quickly. I decided it made more sense to separate Crescendo command definitions into separate files and call them from the build script. I created a file for each definition.

Param([string]$cli)

$cmd = New-CrescendoCommand -Verb Get -Noun ghLabel -OriginalName $cli
$cmd.Platform = "Windows"
$cmd.DefaultParameterSetName = "default"
$cmd.OriginalCommandElements = @("label","list","--json", "name,description,color")
$cmd.Description = "Use this command to retrieve a list of labels defined for current repository."
$cmd.OriginalText = $(gh label list --help | Out-String)
$cmd.usage = New-UsageInfo -usage "Get issue labels"
$example = @{
    Command         = 'Get-ghLabel'
    Description     = 'Get all issue labels for the current GitHub repository.'
    OriginalCommand = 'gh label list'
}
$cmd.Examples += New-ExampleInfo @example
$handler = New-OutputHandler
$handler.ParameterSetName = "default"
$handler.StreamOutput = $true
$handler.handler = '$input | ConvertFrom-JSON | Convert-LabelJSON'
$cmd.OutputHandlers = $handler
#write the command object to the pipeline
$cmd

I came up with a name convention of cr_<command name>.ps1. The file above is cr_Get-ghLabel.ps1 and is in the same folder as build.ps1. The build script now looks like this, with placeholder comments for the remaining commands.