Emulating a class with methods in a module - oop

Question

I am using PowerShell 2.0 (can't upgrade) and I am writing a series of scripts that uses some information from Active Directory. Coming from an OOP languages like C++, I want to emulate a class in PowerShell 2.0, but I know that they only have the class statement in 5.0, and I don't want to use C# to embed classes because I already have a functions (which will be my methods) written in Powershell..
I read this: Powershell. Create a class file to hold Custom Objects?
And I am able to do a function creating a PSObject with "members", but not sure how to make it work with methods so that I can just load the function in my scripts to have a cleaner code.
This is what I have so far:
function New-User {
param($user,
$headers = #("header1","header2","header3","header4") )
$new_user = New-Object -TypeName PSObject
foreach ($header in $headers){
$new_user | Add-Member -membertype NoteProperty -name $header -value $user.$header
}
$new_user | Add-Member -membertype NoteProperty -name "othermember" -value ""
$new_user.PSObject.Typenames.Insert(0,"AD-User")
# Add methods here! for example:
$new_user | Add-Member -membertype METHOD -name "othermember" -value MYDEFINED_FUNCTION($new_user.header1)
return $new_user
}
How I can do this so that I just have this function loaded in my script?
Thanks!

Answer 1

ScriptMethods could fill the gap you are looking for here. Assuming the object has a property for firstname and lastname you could do something like this.
$new_user | Add-Member -membertype ScriptMethod -name samaccountname -value {$this.firstname.substring(0,1) + $this.LastName}
Then with the returned object you can call the scriptmethod samaccountname
$matt = New-Object -TypeName psobject -Property #{
firstname = "matt"
lastname = "bagel"
}
$new = new-user $matt "firstname","lastname"
$new.samaccountname()
Which would return "mbagel". This was tested on 2.0.
So if you wanted to use a function in the method that is just a matter of making sure it is sourced ahead of the time it is called.
function Get-AccoutName{
param(
[string]$firstname,
[string]$lastname
)
$firstname.substring(0,1) + $lastname
}
.....
other code you have
.....
$new_user | Add-Member -membertype ScriptMethod -name samaccountname -value {Get-AccoutName $this.firstname $this.LastName}
If you want these things available all the time then you just need to load them into a PowerShell profile.