Scoping Fun

[RamblingCookieMonster]

A user might expect the following to work, and display Var is 2:

$var = 2

Deploy Example {
    By Task One {
        "Var is $var"
    }
    By noop Two {
        FromSource MyModule
        To C:\PSDeployTo
    }
}

Currently, this will display Var is, given fun with scoping.

An ugly workaround would be to use environment variables, or script scope. This might be an acceptable solution given that tools like psake, the build script, or the CI/CD solution may already populate global or environmental variables:

$script:var = 2

Deploy Example {
    By Task One {
        "Var is $script:var"
    }
    By noop Two {
        FromSource MyModule
        To C:\PSDeployTo
    }
}

These both successfully display Var is 2, but are not very friendly or intuitive to the user.

Potential solution: Add code that extracts script scope variables into the current scope. This would be needed in DeploymentType scripts, and in Task based DeploymentTypes (perhaps we could inject it).

Am I missing anything? The examples above are running from the dev branch.

[devblackops]

Perhaps something similar to how psake is doing it? https://github.com/psake/psake/blob/master/psake.psm1#L252
http://psake.readthedocs.org/en/latest/variable-referencing/

This looks like any variables defined in the properties function are added to the script scope. This is basically like your second example.

[mgreenegit]

What about:

Deploy Example {
  $var = 2
  By Task One {
    "Var is $var"
  }
  By noop Two {
    FromSource MyModule
      To "C:\PSDeploy$var"
  }
}

[mgreenegit]

To answer my own question, it would still need to be script scope. That does work though.

[DexterPOSH]

Why not have a File preamble similar to what Pester has ?
All the variables (or the initialization code) in the preamble gets added to the script scope and is available inside.