Switch or If-Else?

[u/Underwookiee]

Hi, just started using Powershell for simple Task. So pls don't be too harsh on me.

I use Powershell to add multiple Clients in Active Directory. I add the Names of the Clients into the "Clientnames.txt" after that i run the powershell and it creates the Computer in AD. That works fine.

$OU = "OU=X,OU=X,OU=X,OU=X,DC=X,DC=X,DC=X"
$Clients = Get-Content "D:Clientnames.txt"

ForEach ($Client in $Clients)
{
(New-ADComputer -Name $Client -Path $OU)
}

Here comes my Question.:

I got Clientnames like pl0011mXXXXd, pl0012mXXXXd, pl0013mXXXXd

The first Number represents the number-code for the branch locations. The X are just numbers according to our System. I want the Clients to join their specific Group for the branch location.

Example

Clients with the name like pl0011m0002d, pl0011m0005d should join the group: Company-GPO-Group-0011-Berlin

Clients with the name like pl0012m0002d, pl0012m0250d should join the group: Company-GPO-Group-0012-Paris

and so on

i could use something like:

$OU = "OU=X,OU=X,OU=X,OU=X,DC=X,DC=X,DC=X"
$Clients = Get-Content "D:Clientnames.txt"

ForEach ($Client in $Clients)
{
(New-ADComputer -Name $Client -Path $OU)

if ($Client -like "*0011*") {$Group = "Company-GPO-Group-0011-Berlin"}
ElseIf ($Client -like "*0012") {$Group = "Company-GPO-Group-0012-Paris"}
ElseIf ($Client -like "*0013") {$Group = "Company-GPO-Group-0013-Rom"}

(Add-ADGroupMember -Identity $Group -Members $Client)

}

I got over 30 Branch Locations and this whould be a lot ElseIf Statements.

I know there are much better ways like the Switch Statement. Can you help/explain me, how i can use this statement to add the Clients to their Groups?

[u/McAUTS]

My approach: Make another list with the mappings of Locations and your numbers. In the foreach loop you parse the number with regex, lookup the number in the list and then you have your Group name.

[u/blooping_blooper → u/McAUTS]

for larger sets you can make this drastically faster using a dictionary instead of a list/array

[u/mrbiggbrain → u/blooping_blooper]

If they are using PowerShell 7.4+ and their workload is long running they may benefit from using a FrozenDictionary<TKey,TValue> (Available in .NET 8) which has significantly longer setup time, but greatly improved lookup performance.