This is going to sound incredibly simple and stupid to some but I had a problem when I started working with XML ([xml]) objects in PowerShell regarding the creation of duplicates and/or copying of XML objects.
My scenario was that I was reading in an XML config file for Microsoft NAP, altering some values for different sites/domains, and then outputting a modified version of the XML that was specific for each site/domain that could then be imported to keep the configs identical between each site/domain. My problem is that I was taking my local NAP server and using those values as the expected values so I didn't want it to change with each iteration of the domain/site so I thought to create a "temp" copy after reading the XML file in:
...For normal PowerShell objects, this would work fine to create a duplicate object and assign it to $xml2. For some reason that is beyond me, this doesn't work for XML objects. What it does is create a reference to the original object. So if you modify the XML in $xml2 using the assignment method above, you will actually be modifying $xml.
What I ended up discovering is that if you do a Get-Member on an [xml] object, you'll see a method called Clone(). The proper assignment in my loop that resolved this issue was:
My scenario was that I was reading in an XML config file for Microsoft NAP, altering some values for different sites/domains, and then outputting a modified version of the XML that was specific for each site/domain that could then be imported to keep the configs identical between each site/domain. My problem is that I was taking my local NAP server and using those values as the expected values so I didn't want it to change with each iteration of the domain/site so I thought to create a "temp" copy after reading the XML file in:
$xml = gc .\myxmlfile.xml
$sites | ForEach-Object {
$xml2 = $xml
...
}
...For normal PowerShell objects, this would work fine to create a duplicate object and assign it to $xml2. For some reason that is beyond me, this doesn't work for XML objects. What it does is create a reference to the original object. So if you modify the XML in $xml2 using the assignment method above, you will actually be modifying $xml.
What I ended up discovering is that if you do a Get-Member on an [xml] object, you'll see a method called Clone(). The proper assignment in my loop that resolved this issue was:
$xml2 = $xml.Clone()
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