I recently was working on a customer project and I was trying to find the name of a certain SharePoint list item property. (Spoiler, it was “_ModerationStatus”) I knew it was hiding in the item’s FieldValues property, but I wasn’t sure where. To get you up to speed, here’s the PowerShell that got me to this spot:
Connect-PnPOnline -Url https://m365x246038.sharepoint.com/sites/ContosoWeb1
(Get-PnPListItem -List “SitePages” -Id 5).FieldValues
Not only is the list of FieldValues as long as my kids’ Christmas Lists, also like those lists, it’s not in alphabetical, chronological, numerical, or any other order I can conjure up. To say it’s random seems to be giving it more order than it really has.
While I didn’t know exactly was the name of the property I did have a few ideas. Trying to find those random property names would make swimming upstream look like a piece of cake. Fortunately I’ve fought this battle before and I have the scars to prove it. I’m hoping I can save you all the pain I went through, over and over.
The secret is the GetEnumerator() Method of the Hash Table. This got me what I was looking for:
(Get-PnPListItem -List “SitePages” -Id 5).FieldValues.GetEnumerator() | Sort-Object -Property Key
Isn’t that much better?
Once you introduce .GetEnumerator() into the picture you can also get crazy with things like Where-Object, like this:
(Get-PnPListItem -List “SitePages” -Id 5).FieldValues.GetEnumerator() | Sort-Object -Property Key | Where-Object -Property Key -Like -Value “*mod*”
or
(Get-PnPListItem -List “SitePages” -Id 5).FieldValues.GetEnumerator() | Sort-Object -Property Key | Where-Object -Property Value -Like -Value “true”
Normally you would put the Where-Object before the Sort-Object so that the Sort has fewer items to churn through.
While I did this in the context of a hash of SharePoint list item properties, it’s applicable to all PowerShell hash tables.
Happy PowerShelling.
tk
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