Building A Simple Password Generator In C# & .NET - Part 7 - Generating Multiple Passwords | Conrad Akunga

This is Part 7 in a series in which we will build a simple password generator.

In our last post, Building A Simple Password Generator In C# & .NET - Part 6 - Updating Console UI For Memorable Password Generation, we updated our console application to generate memorable passwords.

Our password generator currently generates one password at a time.

It would be an idea if we could tell it how many to generate as a command line argument, and it generates the specified number.

Naturally, the default will be 1.

We start by updating our PasswordSettings as follows:

[CommandOption("-p|--passwordCount")]
[Description("The number of passwords to generate")]
[DefaultValue(1)]
public int PasswordCount { get; set; }

Next, we update our GeneratePasswordCommand to factor in the passed count.

public sealed class GeneratePasswordCommand : Command<PasswordSettings>
{
  public override int Execute(CommandContext context, PasswordSettings settings)
  {
      // Temporary list  to store number of generated passwords
      var passwordList = new List<string>(settings.PasswordCount);
      for (var i = 0; i < settings.PasswordCount; i++)
      {
          string password;
          if (settings.MemorableUncapitalized)
          {
              //Generate memorable password
              password = PasswordGenerator.GenerateMemorablePassword();

              AnsiConsole.MarkupLine(
                  $"Generating memorable password, uncapitalized [blue]({i + 1} of {settings.PasswordCount})[/]");
          }
          else if (settings.MemorableCapitalized)
          {
              password = PasswordGenerator.GenerateMemorablePassword(true);

              AnsiConsole.MarkupLine(
                  $"Generating memorable password, capitalized [blue]({i + 1} of {settings.PasswordCount})[/]");
          }
          else
          {
              // Generate password
              password =
                  PasswordGenerator.GeneratePassword(settings.Numbers, settings.Symbols, settings.PasswordLength,
                      settings.HumanReadable);

              AnsiConsole.MarkupLine(
                  $"Generating password [blue]({i + 1} of {settings.PasswordCount})[/] with length {settings.PasswordLength}, {settings.Symbols} symbols and {settings.Numbers} digits with {(settings.HumanReadable ? "NO " : "")}ambiguous characters");
          }

          passwordList.Add(password);
      }

      var finalPassword = string.Join(Environment.NewLine, passwordList);
      // Copy generated password to clipboard
      ClipboardService.SetText(finalPassword);
      AnsiConsole.MarkupLine($"[green]Generated successfully, and copied to clipboard[/]");

      // Ask the user to confirm password display
      var viewPassword = AnsiConsole.Prompt(
          new ConfirmationPrompt("View?"));

      // If user said yes, print the password
      if (viewPassword)
          AnsiConsole.MarkupLine($"[bold]{Markup.Escape(finalPassword)}[/]");
      return 0;
  }
}