Quality of life suggestion on Get-Mg* cmdlets that use $select

[ThePoShWolf]

Personally, I like how the ActiveDirectory cmdlets operate when it comes to returning certain attributes. By default there is a minimal set of attributes returned and when a property is passed to the -Properties parameter, that property is added to the existing minimal set of properties.

As an example, if I run:

Get-ADUser ThePoShWolf

The return would look something like:

DistinguishedName : CN=Anthony Howell,DC=domain,DC=com
Enabled           : True
GivenName         : Anthony
Name              : Anthony Howell
ObjectClass       : user
ObjectGUID        : <guid>
SamAccountName    : theposhwolf
SID               : <sid>
Surname           : Howell
UserPrincipalName : theposhwolf@domain.com

If I then run:

Get-ADUser ThePoShWolf -Properties Title

It would return:

DistinguishedName : CN=Anthony Howell,DC=domain,DC=com
Enabled           : True
GivenName         : Anthony
Name              : Anthony Howell
ObjectClass       : user
ObjectGUID        : <guid>
SamAccountName    : theposhwolf
SID               : <sid>
Surname           : Howell
Title             : Powershell Dude
UserPrincipalName : theposhwolf@domain.com

If I look at the Graph module, specifically Get-MgUser, it operates a bit differently. If I pass a property to -Properties, only that property is returned:

Get-MgUser -UserId ThePoShWolf@domain.com -Property Department

Id DisplayName Mail UserPrincipalName UserType
-- ----------- ---- ----------------- --------

I understand that this is how the API operates, but I think it would be extremely useful to be able select properties to add to the default as well as the existing function of exclusivity.

Maybe rename the current -Property feature to -Select and when -Property is used, add the property to the default set of properties that are returned. So if -Select is used, only return the passed properties, but if -Property is used, pass a $select array to the API that includes the default properties and adds whatever is passed to them. So take this command, for example:

Get-MgUser -UserId theposhwolf@domain.com -Property Departmet

With my suggestion, I would expect this to pass the following to the API:

GET /v1.0/users/theposhwolf%40domain.com?$Select=businessPhones%2CdisplayName%2CgivenName%2Cid%2CjobTitle%2Cmail%2CmobilePhone%2CofficeLocation%2CpreferredLanguage%2Csurname%2CuserPrincipalName%2CDepartment

The default list of properties is pulled from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/user-get?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http#optional-query-parameters.

[KirkMunro]

Rather than define both -Property and -Select parameters as you suggest @ThePoShWolf, which would be a breaking change because -Select is an alias for -Property so suddenly you would be changing how the code functions behind the scenes for existing scripts, maybe this could be covered via a -IncludeDefaultProperties switch parameter that is only used when invoking a command with -Property.

i.e. If you invoke Get-MgUser -Property RefreshTokensValidFromDateTime, you only get back the RefreshTokensValidFromDateTime value, as it works today, but if you invoke Get-MgUser -Property RefreshTokensValidFromDateTime -IncludeDefaultProperties, you would get back the default properties as well as the RefreshTokensValidFromDateTime property.

Otherwise, the proposal described in the OP would introduce a breaking change, which I would be strongly opposed to.

[peombwa]

I like @KirkMunro's suggestion. We can consider adding this for top level entities, which we know their default properties. This will be an opt-in behavior via a switch parameter.

[ThePoShWolf]

I absolutely did not intend to suggest a breaking change! Thank you @KirkMunro for your suggestion. I believe that to be a much better idea as I am also opposed to breaking changes for something so minor.