[Doc]: Docs claim piping should be supported, but AutoRest does not support it

[sardobi]

Type of issue

Outdated article

Feedback

(This is about the engineering docs.)

The piping best practices docs say this:

For all resources, -InputObject should be implemented for at least the Remove-*, Set-* and Update-* cmdlets

This doesn't seem to be true for Set-* today, though:

• AutoRest doesn't automatically provide an -InputObject implementation, as far as we can tell
• Manually implementing it is hard. In a help channel, @VeryEarly mentioned that "To have similar functionality requires similar customization and as you can see it is quite complicated."
• Several major Azure resources don't support it for Set-, e.g. Set-AzStorageAccount, Set-AzVM

Suspect the docs are outdated here, or at least don't apply for AutoRest-based cmdlets.

Page URL

https://github.com/Azure/azure-powershell/blob/b08bc7cb8c20c5302d126dda1ce89967d124b9ce/documentation/development-docs/design-guidelines/piping-best-practices.md

Content source URL

azure-powershell/documentation/development-docs/design-guidelines/piping-best-practices.md

Line 32 in b08bc7c

For all resources, `-InputObject` should be implemented for at least the `Remove-*`, `Set-*` and `Update-*` cmdlets (and any other cmdlet where an existing resource is being operated on, such as `Start-*`, `Stop-*`, etc.). The implementation of this will be a new parameter set, like the following:

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[sardobi]

Also, we've had conflicting advice about how piping semantics should work.

The docs recommend the following semantics to update a resource:

Get-AzMyResourceType | Set-AzMyResourceType -SomeProperty "someValue"

But some cmdlets work differently, e.g. Set-AzWcfRelay needs the resource's name / group to be specified separately from the piped data:

Get-AzWcfRelay -ResourceGroupName $rg -Name $name | Set-AzWcfRelay -ResourceGroupName $rg -Name $name

And we've separately heard that only the name and resource group from the -InputObject will be respected and the other data will be ignored - which is the opposite of the Relay example