Is there any way to have dynamic options through a database?

[hugoprd]

I would like to have dynamic options for the "choices" attribute. Instead of manually listing every option the user can select, I want to fetch the options from what a specific script returns. The approaches I researched and found (ContextHooks and via "_tasks") didn’t work, because the user always had to respond/select the options first, and only afterward the options I wanted to fetch would be executed by those methods.

I would like to know if there is any way to do this with the tools we have (ContextHooks, _tasks, _external_data).

[sisp]

I think you could create a custom Jinja extension that loads the choices from your data source. For example, a fictitious Jinja extension could register a filter http_get to make an HTTP request; then a copier.yml might look something like this:

_jinja_extensions:
  - your_http_extension.HTTPExtension

dynamic_choices:
  type: str
  choices: |
    {% for choice in 'https://api.example.com/choices' | http_get | from_json -%}
    - "{{ choice }}"
    {% endfor %}

With copier-templates-extensions, you can also load a Jinja extension from a local file instead of a package.

Note that Copier's update algorithm currently relies on replaying a fresh project from the old version of a template. For this to work correctly, project generation must be reproducible, so your dynamic choices must be the same when generating the project for the first time and when replaying the old copy during an update. This may change in the future, but it's a nontrivial problem to solve.

[hugoprd]

Thanks a lot! Your suggestion worked really well