Invoke-Formatter do nothing :(

[hitriyvalenok]

I need to inline variable assignments only. Nothing more. For example, I have:

$var = @{

}

Exptected:

$var = @{}

Full example:

$customConfig = @{
    Rules = @{
        PSUseConsistentIndentation = @{
            Enable = $false
        }
        PSUseConsistentWhitespace = @{
            Enable = $false
        }
        PSAlignAssignmentStatement = @{
            Enable = $true
            CheckHashtable = $false
        }
    }
}
$code = @'
$var = @{

}
'@
Invoke-Formatter -ScriptDefinition $code -Settings $customConfig

But the cmdlet does nothing for me. It returns the code I passed without a tiny change as I've just asked to return $code back untouched. What I'm doing wrong?

[liamjpeters]

Hey @hitriyvalenok 👋,

There isn't a rule in PSSA which causes hashtable declarations with no key-value pairs to be collapsed to a single line. The rules that exist will just control the alignment of the braces and any key-value pairs declared.

So for instance, the below:

$var  =       @{

    }

Would be formatted (in the default config) to:

$var = @{

}

Hopefully that makes sense!

[hitriyvalenok]

Thanks! I got it now. I must make all multiline expressions (string concatenation or member chained call) inline. Examples:

$string = 'hello' +`
'world'
===>
$string = 'hello' + 'world'

InokeSomething 'arg1'`
'arg2'
===>
InokeSomething 'arg1' 'arg2'

$var = $true |`
$false
===>
$var = $true | $false

Can I do it with the formatter? My attempts fail :( Thanks!

[liamjpeters]

There aren't currently any rules that enforce the layout of expressions to a single line.

The current crop of layout rules really focus on:

• spacing (spaces before and after operators, no double spaces, etc)
• Bracket alignment and placement
• alignment of code to the current tab-stop based on bracket-depth
• alignment of elements within hashtables and arrays

Amongst others.

You could put together a pull request to introduce a new rule/edit an existing rule to accommodate your requirements - but I don't know that they'd be particularly popular or that the PR would be accepted. There's value to having whitespace and spacing things out in general for readability. Certainly a rule that enforced single-line expressions would be unpopular.

You could look into creating a custom rule for yourself in PowerShell.

• There's some good documentation on getting started here.
• Jason Shirk's ShowPSAst module is really useful to look at the AST of your code to help put rules together.
• There are some community analyzer rules within the PSSA repo. They may give you an idea of how rules are put together. One of which, Measure-Backtick may get you some of the way towards avoiding the use of backticks.

Hope that helps!