Noob question sorry if very obvious

PowerShell Help
1

Hi Everyone, my apologies in advance if this is a stupid question but I am working through the PowerShell in a month of lunches by Don Jones, and I’m stuck on a problem from Chapter 11. I need to use Get-DnsClientCache and display a list of A and AAAA records from cache. The problem I am having is I am unable to find the property “RecordType” to complete this. I’ve tried 

 Get-DnsClientCache | GM
and 
 Get-DnsClientCache | Select-Object *
to see if I am missing any aliased properties but I am unable to find them.

I’ve checked the full help and am just stuck at this point. I dont want to just look at the answer in the book as that wont give me an understanding on how I can go find properties like this in the future for any other cmdlets. Thank you all for your help.

2

Did you try simply

Get-DnsClientCache
? How does the output looks like?
Did you try 
Get-DnsClientCache -Type AAAA,A
? Is this the result you’re looking for?

3

Got it, its because of the formatting system. The actual property is Type and the default formatting for DNSClient module(Where this cmdlet is from) changes it to Record Type

I did a blog post a while back explaining similar behaviour for the another cmdlet from the same module. There the formatting was applied to the value, here its on the Property.
Hint: You can check the third property in the view section of the formatting xml for this module.

Learn-PowerShel l| Rule the World Using A OneLiner: Hidden Formatting in PowerShell

4

Thanks so much for your help and write up. I did visit it and using your script I was able to open up the formating for Get-DnsClientCache and did find the information below showing how the proparty name is “type” but like you mentioned is aliased to “recordType”.

I really appreciate your help as this is something I can use continue to use in the future for any other similar situations.

 

5

Hi Olaf, and thanks for your help my main problem was that when I did run the cmdlet I was not aware that “RecordType” and “Type” where the same field but just aliased. Thanks again for your help.

6

Weird, recordtype appears in “get-dnsclientcache | select -first 1 | fl”, but not “get-dnsclientcache | select -first 1 | fl *”. I guess that’s how the view in the format file is setup? (CimInstance object)(or not).

PS C:\users\admin> get-dnsclientcache | select -first 1 | fl


Entry      : njpl.yumenetworks.com
RecordName : njpl.yumenetworks.com
RecordType : A
Status     : Success
Section    : Answer
TimeToLive : 2244
DataLength : 4
Data       : 199.127.206.130



PS C:\users\admin> get-dnsclientcache | select -first 1 | fl *


TTL                   : 2240
Caption               :
Description           :
ElementName           :
InstanceID            :
Data                  : 199.127.206.130
DataLength            : 4
Entry                 : njpl.yumenetworks.com
Name                  : njpl.yumenetworks.com
Section               : 1
Status                : 0
TimeToLive            : 2240
Type                  : 1
PSComputerName        :
CimClass              : ROOT/StandardCimv2:MSFT_DNSClientCache
CimInstanceProperties : {Caption, Description, ElementName, InstanceID, Data, DataLength, Entry, Name, Section,
                        Status, TimeToLive, Type}
CimSystemProperties   : Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure.CimSystemProperties
7

The default is Table view and when we do Format-List, it uses the list view(search for DnsClientCacheListView in the formatting xml).
When you do Format-List * , AFAIK its again the same…

8

I don’t believe “| fl *” uses the format file. Ok, I found “DnsClientCacheListView” in C:\WINDOWS\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules\DnsClient\DnsConfig.Format.ps1xml. RecordType is generated like this. Some of the tags don’t show in this forum. Using headers that don’t match property names is confusing (especially in list view). I guess the object type is “Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure.CimInstance#MSFT_DNSClientCache”. “| ft *” would avoid the format file as well, but that’s not as convenient.

 <Label>RecordType</Label>
                <ScriptBlock>
                  $type = $_.Type
                  $typefmt = switch ($type)
                  {
                      0       {"ZERO"}
                      1       {"A"}
                      2       {"NS"}
                      5       {"CNAME"}
                      6       {"SOA"}
                      12      {"PTR"}
                      15      {"MX"}
                      16      {"TEXT"}
                      24      {"SIG"}
                      25      {"KEY"}
                      28      {"AAAA"}
                      30      {"NXT"}
                      33      {"SRV"}
                      35      {"NAPTR"}
                      37      {"CERT"}
                      39      {"DNAME"}
                      41      {"OPT"}
                      43      {"DS"}
                      46      {"RRSIG"}
                      47      {"NSEC"}
                      48      {"DNSKEY"}
                      49      {"DHCID"}
                      50      {"NSEC3"}
                      51      {"NSEC3PARAM"}
                      255     {""}
                      default {$type}
                  }
                  return $typefmt
                </ScriptBlock>