Interactive mode

[waldekmastykarz]

What do you think about extending CLI with a config setting that allows you to put CLI in interactive mode? Currently, we have a few commands where you can retrieve items by name. If there are multiple items matching the specified name, the CLI will prompt you to disambiguate throwing an error with the list of IDs. If CLI was in interactive mode, rather than throwing an error, it would allow you to select one of the items and continue with your selection. What do you think?

@pnp/cli-for-microsoft-365-maintainers I'd appreciate your opinion 🙂

[appieschot]

I like the idea, but for me that wouldn't add to much value; 99% of my use cases for the CLI are automations / scripts that I run. But then again I might not be the target audience for this change; I do like the idea :).

[arjunumenon]

Idea is amazing 🔥. Definitely is user friendly. I am assuming the approach would be similar to what you were envisioning here right? For a single command executions, that is going to be a real life saver.

Just curious on how the behavior would be on series of command execution.
Say for instance, currently I am getting an app using m365 aad app get and trying to get the result to variable. Currently we may get the error message.
In the new interactive way, I am just curious how the behavior is going to be. Will the process be on a waiting state if there are multiple results?

[waldekmastykarz]

we can also update the docs so that serialized script execution will not be affected by this approach

What do you mean with that?

[arjunumenon]

What do you mean with that?

What I was trying to explain is, once we have this feature in place , we can mention in the command documentation that-
If you have enabled Interactive mode, you may have to disable the interactive mode configuration so that interactive mode will not affect your script execution.
Was just trying to put my mental note in command. 😊

[waldekmastykarz]

Ah, got it. Since this would apply to all commands, what do you think about documenting it in one place instead of repeating it in each command?

[arjunumenon]

Ah, got it. Since this would apply to all commands, what do you think about documenting it in one place instead of repeating it in each command?

Totally make sense to have in one place.

Here is what my thought -
Once we have this feature in place, we will have a category / section something like CLI in Interactive Mode in User Guide documentation. Over there we will explain how do you set it up and how it works.
In the same documentation we can give an Attention Section which will have the details mentioned above.
Something in the lines of this section

Does it make sense?

[waldekmastykarz]

Excellent!