Question

I’m making a script that will parse through 2,000 XML files for data & then output it to an Excel file.
Here’s what I have so far:

#Get XML File
$path = Get-ChildItem C:\Users\bcamareno\Desktop\xml\xml

#Start Excel
$xl=New-Object -ComObject "Excel.Application"
$wb=$xl.Workbooks.Add()
$ws=$wb.ActiveSheet

$cells=$ws.Cells
$cells.item(1,1)="HDD Report"
$cells.item(1,1).font.bold=$True
$cells.item(1,1).font.size=18

#Rows & Cols
$row=3
$col=1
$A=4
$B=4
$C=4
$D=1
$E=2
$F=3

#column headings
"Server","Disk0","Disk1","Disk2","Disk3","Disk4","Disk5","Disk6","Disk7" | foreach {
    $cells.item($row,$col)=$_
    $cells.item($row,$col).font.bold=$True
    $col++
}

#Site Code
foreach ($item in $Path) {
$cells.item($A,$D)= $item -replace "_pdisk.xml",""
      $A++
}

#Grab ProductID
foreach ($item in $Path) {
    [xml]$content = Get-Content "c:\Users\bcamareno\Desktop\xml\xml\$item"
    $try= $Content.SelectNodes('//ProductID') | select "#Text"
    $cells.item($B,$E)= $try -replace "@{#text=","" -replace "}",""
    $B,$E++
}

$xl.Visible=$True

But when I run it, the data comes out wrong, it seems like it’s only parsing the last file & then adding that result to the cells.

I can add an XML if needed.

Answer 1

$B never gets incremented, so you aren’t ever adding rows to the spreadsheet – just overwriting the same row 2000 times over.

I would also suggest that you use more descriptive variable names than single letters.

Also, change this line:

[xml]$content = Get-Content "c:\Users\bcamareno\Desktop\xml\xml\$item"

To this:

[xml]$content = Get-Content $item.FullName

That way, when you change the location of your XML Files, you only have to do it once (when you call Get-ChildItem) and aren’t chasing a “bug” for 2 hours because you forgot to update all instances of that path.