HtmlWebResponseObject

PowerShell Help
1

Hi Guys. Is there any way to view HtmlWebResponseObject output in a screen-readable format?

I’m building a script and have to work with Rest API and right now just want to be able to view the response in a clean way (on screen).

It’s only for testing purposes, but currently, everything is nested and I have to dig through it each time.

I’m using this (although really I would like to be selecting * so I can see the response code as well as all the content, but that was just giving me one more step).

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $URI -Method POST -Body $postparams | Select content

to get this

{"API":{"response":{"operation":{"result":{"message":"Successfully fetched.","created-date":"21/09/2018 08:57 AM","status":"Success","statuscode":200},"Details":{"field-names":{"name...

But i’d like to just see all that in one go…

I tried piping to format-list and its a bit better but still not readable.

Does anyone have a tip for me? Initially, I thought I could just pipe it to convertto-json and get a plain text output but it’s not formatted so that doesn’t help

 

As a workaround right now I am putting each block into a $var and calling it like this $var.content

2

damn… just worked it out after posting this…

I can use this to get a plain formatted text output

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $URI -Method POST -Body $postparams | convertfrom-Json | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 20

I’d still be curious if there is a better way, but this at least lets me read through it enough to work out what I need.

3

If it’s returning JSON, you should try using Invoke-RestMethod instead; it takes care of most of the conversions automatically.

4

Not really sure what the difference is.

Invoke-RESTMethod -Uri $URI -Method Post -Body $postparams | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 20

Returns the same object, which I convert to JSON to get the same output…

5

Invoke-RestMethod is returning JSON, so there is no need convert it to JSON again.

$result = Invoke-RESTMethod -Uri $URI -Method Post -Body $postparams | Select *

That should get you a PSObject. Keep in mind that JSON is typically a nested object, so you’ll need to most likely do some parsing work to get exactly what you need, but now that it’s a PSObject, you can use simple dot notation to get what you need (e.g. $result.api.response.result)

6

Hi Rob. I’m just converting back to JSON so that I can get my format in an easy to read format while I’m testing… When it’s in a PSobject, then as you said I have to dot it out but that is tricky when i don’t know what i need yet. Converting to JSON with the -depth option allows me to just see plain text on the screen like this.

 

{

"API":  {

"response":  {

"operation":  {

"result":  {

"message":  "Field or column name is not found.",

"status":  "Invalid column(s) specified.",

"statuscode":  3025

},

"name":  "read"

}

},

"version":  1

}

}