{"id":2328,"date":"2013-12-29T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-29T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/heyscriptingguy\/2013\/12\/29\/weekend-scripter-using-powershell-to-replace-stsadm\/"},"modified":"2013-12-29T00:01:00","modified_gmt":"2013-12-29T00:01:00","slug":"weekend-scripter-using-powershell-to-replace-stsadm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/weekend-scripter-using-powershell-to-replace-stsadm\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Scripter: Using PowerShell to Replace STSADM"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary<\/b>: Learn about a Windows PowerShell script to replace STSADM –o enumallwebs<\/b> in SharePoint.<\/p>\n

Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, is here. Welcome back today guest blogger, Brian Jackett<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Brian is a senior premier field engineer at Microsoft who has specialized in SharePoint development, Windows PowerShell, and Project Server since 2008. Brian is a steering committee member of the Buckeye SharePoint User Group and coauthor of Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Creating and Implementing Real-World Projects<\/a>. He enjoys giving back to the community through giving presentations, planning and volunteering at conferences, maintaining a SharePoint\/.NET-centric blog (The Frog Pond of Technology<\/a>), and contributing to the SharePoint Twitterverse (@BrianTJackett).  He also holds several Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) certificates for SharePoint-related technologies.<\/p>\n

Just like many other Microsoft server applications, SharePoint has had a fair number of command-line interfaces for administrating the product. STSADM.exe was one of these command line tools. Since SharePoint 2010, Windows PowerShell has become the preferred command-line administration tool.  However, there are certain instances where Windows PowerShell does not provide an exact replacement for tools such as STSADM.exe. In this post, we will explore one such command (enumallwebs<\/b>) and attempt to replace that functionality with a Windows PowerShell script.<\/p>\n

Problem<\/h2>\n

The SharePoint team that is in charge of Windows PowerShell cmdlets has done a great job of building a replacement for most of the STSADM.exe capabilities (and in many cases, greatly surpassed them). For a list of the cmdlets, see Stsadm to Windows PowerShell mapping in SharePoint 2013<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As you can see, there are a few STSADM.exe capabilities that do not have a 1 to 1 equivalent. One example is the STSADM –o enumallwebs<\/b> command.  This is a very popular command to generate an XML output of all content databases in the SharePoint farm, site collections, and sites within the databases, the template used, URL, and more. Because there is not a replacement for this command, I started looking for a way to replace portions of the functionality.<\/p>\n

Research<\/h2>\n

Whenever I encounter a large problem or challenge, I find it best to start at the beginning and take one step at a time. To start with, I wanted to see what the Help information for enumallwebs provided.  Knowing what the parameters are and whether they are required vs. optional is very helpful.  Following is the output from STSADM –help enumallwebs<\/b>:<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

I do not have the source code for the STSADM executable, so I don’t know how the output is generated.  As such, I will have to rely on a bit of black-box testing<\/a>, and I’ll run various sample-case executions of the command and compare what output is generated.<\/p>\n

I start by looking at the output when running against my SharePoint 2013 lab farm and with no parameters specified. This gives me the basic XML hierarchy that I need to re-create, what properties to pull back, and a sample to compare my Windows PowerShell script results against. The following screenshot shows the output from the enumallwebs<\/b> command with no parameters.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

 I see that the general hierarchy of XML is as follows:<\/p>\n

<Databases><\/p>\n

<Database…><\/p>\n

<Site…><\/p>\n

<Webs…><\/p>\n

<Web…\/><\/p>\n

<\/Webs><\/p>\n

<\/Site><\/p>\n

<\/Database><\/p>\n

<\/Databases><\/p>\n

This hierarchy should be fairly easy to replicate. Normally, the Get-SPContentDatabase<\/b> cmdlet would be sufficient; but unfortunately, it does not include the Central Administration content databases. As a workaround, the Get-SPWebApplication –IncludeCentralAdministration<\/b> command can be used to gather all web applications including Central Administration. Piping this to Select-Object –ExpandProperty ContentDatabases<\/b> will then retrieve all the necessary content databases, and we can iterate over each site collection (and later site) contained within each content database.<\/p>\n

Get-SPWebApplication -IncludeCentralAdministration | Select-Object -ExpandProperty ContentDatabases<\/p>\n

Next, I break down each XML element to find which properties we need to return. There is nothing at the Databases<\/b> level, so we can continue on to database. The Database<\/b> XML element has three attributes:<\/p>\n