Building A Simple Password Generator In C# & .NET - Part 6 - Updating Console UI For Memorable Password Generation

This is Part 6 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 5 - Generating Memorable Passwords, we looked at how to generate memorable passwords in the form below:

even-camp-jab-spying
morse-bruises-stack-progeny
soaps-toughen-bee-gateway
wine-sooner-funnies-dub

In this post, we will update our console UI to support this.

We support two types of memorable passwords:

1. Normal, uncapitalized ones, in the form bye-porch-urchin-caddy
2. Capitalized ones, in the form vroom-poach-war-vee

The first step is updating our PasswordSettings class to add switches to support this.

First, the normal case:

[CommandOption("-m|--memorable")]
[Description("Whether passwords generated should be memorable, no capitalization")]
public bool MemorableUncapitalized { get; set; }

Next, the Capitalized case:

[CommandOption("-c|--memorableCapitalized")]
[Description("Whether passwords generated should be memorable and capitalized")]
public bool MemorableCapitalized { get; set; }

Finally, we update the GeneratePasswordCommand to handle the three cases:

1. Memorable passwords (normal)
2. Memorable passwords (capitalized)
3. Human-readable passwords
4. Generic passwords

public sealed class GeneratePasswordCommand : Command<PasswordSettings>
{
  public override int Execute(CommandContext context, PasswordSettings settings)
  {
      string password;
      if (settings.MemorableUncapitalized)
      {
          //Generate memorable password
          password = PasswordGenerator.GenerateMemorablePassword();

          AnsiConsole.MarkupLine(
              "Generating memorable password, uncapitalized");
      }
      else if (settings.MemorableCapitalized)
      {
          password = PasswordGenerator.GenerateMemorablePassword(true);

          AnsiConsole.MarkupLine(
              "Generating memorable password, capitalized");
      }
      else
      {
          // Generate password
          password =
              PasswordGenerator.GeneratePassword(settings.Numbers, settings.Symbols, settings.PasswordLength,
                  settings.HumanReadable);

          AnsiConsole.MarkupLine(
              $"Generating password with length {settings.PasswordLength}, {settings.Symbols} symbols and {settings.Numbers} digits with {(settings.HumanReadable ? "NO " : "")}ambiguous characters");
      }

      // Copy generated password to clipboard
      ClipboardService.SetText(password);
      AnsiConsole.MarkupLine($"[green]Generated Password successfully, and copied to clipboard[/]");

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

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

We can then run our console as follows, for capitalized memorable passwords:

dotnet run -- -c

This should print something like this:

We can then also run it for uncapitalized memorable passwords:

dotnet run -- -m

This should print something like this:

In our next post, we will look at how to add support for this to the console UI.

TLDR

In this post, we have added support for generating memorable passwords (capitalized and otherwise) to the console application.

The code is in my GitHub.

Happy hacking!