Use PowerShell to Display a Basic Toast Notification

This post contains an example of how we can use PowerShell to display a basic toast notification.  If you would like more advanced features, see use PowerShell to display an advanced toast notification.

When we construct a toast notification, we define the way it looks by using XML.  And the schema/format of this XML is pre-defined in 8 XML templates:

ToastImageAndText01	Image, regular text wrapped across 3 lines
ToastImageAndText02	Image, bold text on line 1, regular text wrapped across lines 2 and 3
ToastImageAndText03	Image, bold text wrapped across lines 1 and 2, regular text on line 3
ToastImageAndText04	Image, bold text on line 1, regular text on line 2, regular text on line 3
ToastText01	Regular text wrapped across 3 lines
ToastText02	Bold text on line 1, regular text wrapped across lines 2 and 3
ToastText03	Bold text wrapped across lines 1 and 2, regular text on line 3
ToastText04	Bold text on line 1, regular text on line 2, regular text on line 3

Let’s take ToastTest02 as our simple example.  To find out what the default XML schema is for that type of notification we can use the following:

$ToastText02 = [Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastTemplateType, Windows.UI.Notifications, ContentType = WindowsRuntime]::ToastText02
$ToastText02XML = [Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastNotificationManager, Windows.UI.Notifications, ContentType = WindowsRuntime]::GetTemplateContent($ToastText02)

#view the default XML
$ToastText02XML.GetXml()

which will output the following default template:

<toast>
	<visual>
		<binding template="ToastText02">
			<text id="1"></text>
			<text id="2"></text>
		</binding>
	</visual>
</toast>

Now all we need to do is substitute in values for the <text> elements.  We can easily do this using XPath because the template handily gives each <text> element an id attribute of 1 and 2.

$ToastText02 = [Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastTemplateType, Windows.UI.Notifications, ContentType = WindowsRuntime]::ToastText02
$ToastText02XML = [Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastNotificationManager, Windows.UI.Notifications, ContentType = WindowsRuntime]::GetTemplateContent($ToastText02)

$text1 = 'This is some text.'
$text2 = 'And this is more text.'

#replace text with attribute id of 1
$ToastText02XML.SelectSingleNode('//text[@id="1"]').InnerText = $text1

#replace text with attribute id of 2
$ToastText02XML.SelectSingleNode('//text[@id="2"]').InnerText = $text2

#view the updated XML 
$ToastText02XML.GetXml()

and the XML now becomes:

<toast>
	<visual>
		<binding template="ToastText02">
			<text id="1">This is some text.</text>
			<text id="2">And this is more text.</text>
		</binding>
	</visual>
</toast>

Each toast notification then needs a specific AppId, and this is important because the name of this application will show in our toast notification.  This can be any AppId retrieved from running Get-StartApps in PowerShell.  As an example, here we use Windows PowerShell as our AppId:

$AppId = (Get-StartApps | Where Name -eq "Windows PowerShell" | Select -First 1 -ExpandProperty AppID)

and here we user Software Center as our AppId:

$AppId = (Get-StartApps | Where Name -eq "Software Center" | Select -First 1 -ExpandProperty AppID)

When we join it all together we can then display a simple toast notification like so:

#get template
$ToastText02 = [Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastTemplateType, Windows.UI.Notifications, ContentType = WindowsRuntime]::ToastText02
$ToastText02XML = [Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastNotificationManager, Windows.UI.Notifications, ContentType = WindowsRuntime]::GetTemplateContent($ToastText02)

#define our text
$text1 = 'This is some text.'
$text2 = 'And this is more text.'

#replace template with out text
$ToastText02XML.SelectSingleNode('//text[@id="1"]').InnerText = $text1
$ToastText02XML.SelectSingleNode('//text[@id="2"]').InnerText = $text2

#retrieve the appid
$AppId = (Get-StartApps | Where Name -eq "Windows PowerShell" | Select -First 1 -ExpandProperty AppID)

#show notification
[Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastNotificationManager]::CreateToastNotifier($AppId).Show($ToastText02XML)

It’s also worth noting that you can only invoke toast notifications as the logged in user – NOT from the system account or otherwise, in which case you will likely get an access denied error.