Let's say we have a cmdlet get-foo

get-foo -show config

should show some formatted text as below

Data Store Path: c:\foo\datastore
Total Items: 100

Command Successful.

$a = (get-foo -show config)

it should return a object that has two members
strPath and intTotalItems

The text in the labels should not be part of the return object.

How do we handle this in cmdlet code?

You can write logging messages to the Verbose stream or the Debug stream (either with the WriteVerbose method or WriteDebug method).

If you need to write out warning messages, you would use WriteWarning.

The result of your cmdlet would be written using the WriteObject method.

Your resulting command would look more like:

Get-Foo -Verbose

or

$a = (Get-Foo -verbose)

Verbose or Debug output works with -verbose or -debug parameters only. I needed them in the standard output.

I am glad I have figured it out myself. The cmdlet need to use a custom format file (*.format.ps1xml file). Defining the file is not very simple though. Needs some practice.

But you can output anything you want without disturbing the returning objects structure.
:)

Yes, I think you should be going the ETS route by creating a .ps1xml file specific to the type of objects you are dealing with.

Need help with that?

BTW... You shouldn't try editing the format.ps1xml files. You should create your own XML formatting file, and load that with the Update-TypeData cmdlet.