Get started

Create one or more tables

To get started we need to create a table

$DataTable = New-DataTable -TableName 'UsersTable'

Add columns to tables

Next we need to add a few columns to the table. First we'll add a few plain columns. Secondly we will add a column with an expression. This expression concatinates firstname and lastname to a displayname. Last we will add a column that has a default value in case nothing is set.

Add-DataTableColumn -DataTable $DataTable -Names 'ID','FirstName','LastName'

Add-DataTableColumn -DataTable $DataTable -Names 'DisplayName' -Expression "[FirstName] + ' ' + [LastName]"

Add-DataTableColumn -DataTable $DataTable -Names 'DefaultTheme' -DefaultValue 'Blue'

Add rows to tables

Now that we have a basic strucutre in our users table we can start to add rows. The Add-DataTableRow cmdlet accepts psobjects as input. The object should contains properties corresponding to columns in the DataTable.

$NewRow = [pscustomobject]@{

ID = 1

FirstName = 'Will'

LastName = 'Smith'

}

$NewRow | Add-DataTableRow -DataTable $DataTable

The content of the data table is now

$DataTable | Format-Table

ID FirstName LastName DisplayName DefaultTheme

-- --------- -------- ----------- ------------

1 Will Smith Will Smith Dark

Create a dataset

In case several data tables are needed a data set can be created. A data set can be viewed as a container of data tables and provides a few extra capabilities like data table relations. To create a data set and add tables run the following commands.

$DataSet = New-DataSet

Add-DataSetTable -Dataset $Dataset -DataTable $DataTable