Consider simplifying JSON option input

[garrytrinder]

Currently we have commands that take a JSON string as an input, an example of this is the spo site sitescript add command that accepts a JSON string in the --content option.

In PowerShell, to read the contents of a JSON file and pass a JSON string into the command you have to perform some sanitisation of the JSON string before it is parsed as being valid JSON by the command.

$sitescript = Get-Content -Path .\sitescript.json | ConvertFrom-Json | ConvertTo-Json -Compress
$sitescript = '`"{0}"`' -f $sitescript.Replace('"', '""')
o365 spo sitescript add --title "My Script" --content $sitescript

Performing the above is not ideal and has been highlighted before in discussion #1311

The Azure CLI gets around this issue by allowing file path to be specified by prepending with the @ character, so if we implemented a similar approach, our spo sitescript add command would be as follows to grab the contents of a file on disk and pass it into the command.

o365 spo sitescript add --title "My Script" --content @sitescript.json

Thoughts?

[waldekmastykarz]

Working with JSON or any other escaped string in a shell is indeed tough. I'd be all for offering a better experience for it. Rather than using a magic token like @, I'd prefer to expose an additional option that expects a path and have users explicitly choose if they want to specify the string or a path to a file.

[waldekmastykarz]

Having thought about it some more... introducing a separate option for JSON for each option that accepts a JSON string would bring quite some overhead. Using a special token like the @ in az cli might not be such a bad idea after all.

[waldekmastykarz]

I created an issue #2042 to track the work. Thanks again for bringing it up 👍