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There's a component of the formatting system that doesn't

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really get talked about much, well, at least not in my experience.

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I want you to be across it because you might find it useful.

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Let's check out formatting views.

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Each of the format cmdlets in PowerShell have a parameter named view.

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This can be used to define different formatting views other than the

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default one if there are any views defined in the formatting files. If

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there are no alternate views defined, well,

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this parameter isn't going to do much for you.

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Let's take a quick look at the format data again with

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Get‑FormatData. For the TypeName,

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I'll paste the value for System.Diagnostics.Process that's

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still on my clipboard from a previous clip,

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and I'll drop in the PowerShell version as 5.1. Check out this

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property here named FormatViewDefinition,

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and you can see there are four entries in total here.

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We've got process. Priority, StartTime, and process again.

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This means there are different views for the process object type that we could

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leverage when formatting the process data in PowerShell.

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I'm going to press the up arrow to get that command back, and then put a

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closing bracket, followed by pressing the home key to go to the start of

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the command, and I'm going to put an opening bracket there. And I'll press

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end on my keyboard again to get back to the end of the command, and then

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put .FormatViewDefinition.

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So we can look a bit deeper at that specific property.

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By doing this,

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we get a bit more information on those four views that are defined.

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We can now see that process, Priority, and StartTime are all table‑based

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views and that the second process view is a wide‑based view.

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I've still got this information stored in the XML file from the previous clip.

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So again, let's run notepad and specify the path to the process.xml file.

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And I'll expand that to use the screen real estate here. And

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in there, if you look towards the top,

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we start by defining a Configuration and ViewDefinitions,

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and then a new view is defined.

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This one is the default view named process.

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If I scroll down a little,

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that first view gets closed, and look at this, another view

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gets defined, and this one is called Priority.

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This view is for the same type of data, and it's also based on a table.

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But notice here that it's actually doing some grouping

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based on the PriorityClass property.

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And lastly, if we scroll down a little bit more,

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there's a third view defined here named StartTime.

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And this one is doing some grouping based on the date,

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and it's also using a ScriptBlock to calculate that property.

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Let's jump back into the PowerShell console, and I'll show these

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to you. If I run Get‑Process and pipe that down to Format‑Table

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and then specify the view parameter, one of those alternate

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views was called StartTime, so let's give that a go.

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What you see here in the output, if I scroll up,

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is a custom view that is grouping the results based

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on the start time of the process.

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So instead of us having to do the grouping manually,

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this PowerShell view will do it for us.

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One interesting thing to note here is that there are some duplicate tables,

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and that's because this data is getting grouped,

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but it hasn't been sorted first. So really,

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we should do a Get‑Process, pass that to sort based on the

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StartTime, and then send it down to Format‑Table and specify

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the alternate view of StartTime.

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And now that looks a little bit better.

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If you don't want to dig around in the format data to figure out

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what views are available for each object type,

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there's a handy little trick that I remember from a few years ago,

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and I can't remember where I saw it, but if you run a

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command and pipe it to format command,

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you can do specify the view parameter and then just put in an incorrect name,

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so I'll just put a as the view name.

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The PowerShell error message here tells us that the view can't be found,

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but it then actually goes and tells us what views are

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available for this object type.

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So that's a quick tip if you want to find the

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formatting views for an object type, but you don't want to dig around in the format data.