👀 Views: 1415 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-05

PowerShell ConvertTo-Json Serialization

I've spent hours debugging this and I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm building a feature where I'm having trouble serializing a large object in PowerShell using `ConvertTo-Json`... The object contains several nested arrays and dictionaries, and when I attempt to convert it, I get an unexpected output that doesn't match the structure of the original object. For instance, I have the following PowerShell code: ```powershell $largeObject = @{ Name = 'TestObject'; Details = @{ Description = 'This is a test'; Attributes = @( @{Key = 'Color'; Value = 'Red'}, @{Key = 'Size'; Value = 'Large'}, @{Key = 'Weight'; Value = 'Heavy'} ) } } $jsonOutput = $largeObject | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 5 Write-Output $jsonOutput ``` When I run this script, I expect to see a nicely formatted JSON output that maintains the structure of the original object. However, the `Attributes` array is flattened, and the output looks like this: ```json { "Name": "TestObject", "Details": { "Description": "This is a test", "Attributes": ["System.Collections.Hashtable", "System.Collections.Hashtable", "System.Collections.Hashtable"] } } ``` Instead of getting the actual key-value pairs for each attribute, I'm seeing the type names of the hashtable objects. I tried increasing the `-Depth` parameter to 10, but it didn't change the output. Is there a specific way to handle nested hashtables or arrays so that `ConvertTo-Json` will serialize them correctly? I've also checked for any updates in PowerShell 7.3, and I’m running the latest version, but the issue persists. Any help would be appreciated! I've been using Powershell for about a year now. Any ideas what could be causing this? The project is a service built with Powershell. This is for a service running on Ubuntu 22.04. Am I approaching this the right way? Any ideas what could be causing this?