Tag Archives: iexplore

Automate App Server (Visual) Website Test

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To visually determine if a website is loading slowly, or not, you might open the browser, enter the URL, and note the speed at which the page loads. Well, since I write tools to speed things up, writing one for this need, seemed to make sense. Part of the work was already done, thanks to the little function below that I had already written. It’s a function called Open-InternetExplorer and you can likely guess what it does. If you feed it a URL as the value for the -Url parameter, it’ll open up that webpage, otherwise, it’ll just open to the default homepage.

Set-Alias -Name iexplore -Value Open-InternetExplorer
Function Open-InternetExplorer {
    Param ([string]$Url)
 
    If ($Url) {
        Start-Process -FilePath iexplore $Url
    } Else {
        Start-Process -FilePath iexplore
    }
}

If you didn’t already notice, I’ve also included an alias be set for this function. With that in place, I can also enter iexplore to invoke the Open-InternetExplorer function. Notice that the Start-Process cmdlets inside the function include iexplore as the value for the -FilePath parameter. This is the Internet Explorer executable, and not the function alias.

Okay, so now we know how we can quickly open a new IE browser and determine what webpage to load. Let’s assume the page I want to check is http://appsrv01.subdomain.mydomain.com. This means, I can enter Open-InternetExplorer http://appsrv01.subdomain.mydomain.com and IE will open to that webpage (on that server). I may use a load balanced, front end URL for users to access the application, such as http://myapp.subdomain.mydomain.com. While the app is important (as it is one of the servers), knowing that all the app servers are responding and loading the page quickly is helpful.

For the remaining examples, let’s assume I have a variable called $MyAppServers that contains the default properties for five servers, returned from the Get-ADComputer cmdlet.

PS> $MyAppServers = Get-ADComputer -Filter * -SearchBase 'OU=MyApp,DC=subdomain,DC=mydomain,DC=com'
PS> $MyAppServers.Name
appsrv01
appsrv02
appsrv03
appsrv04
appsrv05

Now, let’s combine the $MyAppServers variable, with the function (and the ForEach-Object cmdlet, as the function wasn’t written to accept multiple URLs), so that we can open each app server’s webpage. This will allow us to determine if any of the pages load slower than any others, or more importantly, to determine if a page doesn’t load at all. Here’s how we do that.

PS> $MyAppServers.Name | ForEach-Object {Open-InternetExplorer -Url "$_.subdomain.mydomain.com"}

Once this command is run, it’ll open an Internet Explorer browser window for each app URL. In my case (Windows 8.1), I can hover over the IE taskbar items and view a small image of each IE window. Notice in the image below that one of the application servers didn’t load. I’ll need to look into that server!

automate-app-server-visual-website-test01

While I haven’t yet, the command above could be added to its own function, so I don’t have to type it out each time, and instead can simply enter the function’s name, or alias. In closing, I’ll mention another small function I added to my profile. This one will dump all running instances of Internet Explorer, allowing me to avoid manually closing each IE window, or typing out the Get-Process–Stop-Process command that the function runs.

Set-Alias -Name diexplore -Value Stop-InternetExplorer
Function Stop-InternetExplorer {
    Get-Process -Name iexplore | Stop-Process
}

Create a Function to Open Internet Explorer (Like in Run)

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Even before Windows PowerShell, I strove to do things quickly. One such thing was to open Internet Explorer (IE) from the Run dialog. In the image below, you can see how you can enter iexplore followed by a space and then a URL. When you press OK, it will launch IE and direct itself to the URL that was passed along. If no URL is provided, it will open the home page.

Create Function to Open Internet Explorer (Like in Run)01

When I transferred this knowledge to PowerShell, I was sad to see that entering the same thing in the console host resulted in an error: “The term ‘iexplore’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program.”  I wasn’t overly concerned about it, moved on, and mostly forgot about it.

After spending last week at the PowerShell Summit North America 2015, I saw several demos from speakers that included ‘start iexplore <URL>,’ where start is an alias for Start-Process. Use Get-Alias to see this yourself: Get-Alias -Name start. I decided I would write up a simple function, to add to my profile, that would allow me to just use iexplore again.

With the function below, in place, I can enter iexplore in PowerShell to open Internet Explorer to the home page, or iexplore bing.com to open Internet Explorer to bing.com, for example — pretty straightforward. Here it is: the little function that saves me six keystrokes every time I use it. Don’t worry, it won’t be long before I make up for the lost keystrokes from writing the function itself.

Function iexplore {
	Param ([string]$Url)

	If ($Url) {
		start iexplore $Url
	} Else {
		start iexplore
	}
}

And, here’s the results.

Create Function to Open Internet Explorer (Like in Run)02

Before we close for the day, we should probably makes a couple changes to our function. We should change the function name so it uses an approved verb, along with the verb-noun naming convention, and then create an alias (iexplore), to call the function.

Set-Alias -Name iexplore -Value Open-InternetExplorer

Function Open-InternetExplorer {
	Param ([string]$Url)

	If ($Url) {
		start iexplore $Url
	} Else {
		start iexplore
	}
}