PlatyPS needs to create help for dynamic parameters

[zjalexander]

See https://windowsserver.uservoice.com/forums/301869-powershell/suggestions/16304866-custom-cmdlet-help-is-broken-in-5-0 and https://windowsserver.uservoice.com/forums/301869-powershell/suggestions/15487152-help-for-documentencryptioncert-dynamic-parameter

[vors]

What exactly support for dynamic help means?
Can you elaborate please.

[zjalexander]

Providers can have different parameter sets for some cmdlets, such as the Certificate provider or the Registry provider. That is defined in an XML section. Our current solution to generate help for this set of content is to copy the XML out of one file and paste it into the latest version of help. As the UserVoice entries indicate, this is .... not scaling successfully.

cc @joeyaiello and @juneb to both check my accuracy and because they are interested in this

[juneb]

Almost! Providers can add parameters to a cmdlet dynamically. To cover this in help, we added custom cmdlet help for providers and nested it in provider help XML. To make it work, the provider has to implement the ICmdletProviderSupportsHelp interface. I think all of the core providers did that by the close of 3.0.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2009/05/28/adding-custom-cmdlet-help-for-providers/

Back in 3.0, I used a web-based tool (Wassim's?) to write and generate the custom cmdlet help for each provider. Then, I wrote a script that added the provider help to each cmdlet help XML file. It should be in the directory of help automation scripts that I left.

Let me know if you need anything else.

[BernieWhite]

Related to #111

[sdwheeler]

Our current standard is to document all parameters for all supported providers. The documentation indicates which provider the parameter comes from. We need a way for PlatyPS to discover the dynamic parameters during new and update workflows.