How can a quarto extension trigger multiple renders for a quarto document automatically based on different profile environments?

[coatless]

Description

I'm exploring using Quarto's environment profiles to generate multiple versions of a document.

From the documentation, if we have two environment files, e.g. _quarto-advanced.yml and _quarto-production.yml, then we can render a single document using:

# multiple profiles on command line
quarto render --profile advanced,production

This makes an assumption that one of the profiles specifies an output-dir: value that differs from the working directory.

My main question is can I have a quarto extension automatically render the file under multiple profiles if they exist without having the user issue the quarto render command? That Is, I want them to be able to press a button in either RStudio or VS Code and the output just appears.

From there, a couple of side questions are:

1. Can the name of the rendered quarto document be modified during the save?
2. Is there a way to introduce a simplified class name for the code cell? For instance, if we have:

```{.content-visible when-profile="production"}
# Some code
```

We would want to use a new class name such as .env-prod to decrease the amount of typing.

```{.env-prod}
# Some code
```

[cscheid]

From there, a couple of side questions are:

1. Can the name of the rendered quarto document be modified during the save?
2. Is there a way to introduce a simplified class name for the code cell? For instance, if we have:

```{.content-visible when-profile="production"}
# Some code
```

We would want to use a new class name such as .env-prod to decrease the amount of typing.

```{.env-prod}
# Some code
```

As you have noticed, this is currently not documented very well, but we're working on improving it. With that said, let me explain to you here how to achieve the outcome of your second question.

What we're going to do is we'll write a Lua filter that converts .env-prod to a conditional block.

In 1.4, conditional blocks are declared using .content-visible, but are implemented as a "Custom AST" node, a special kind of node in the Lua filter that extends the nodes provided by Pandoc (like callouts and panel tabsets). Custom AST nodes are recognized and parsed before user filters. So if your user filter emits a div with .content-visible, it's too late for quarto to process it. Instead, you have to call the quarto API explicitly. The filter would look something like this: (NB: I haven't tested it!)

function Div(div)
  if not div.classes:includes(".env-prod") then
    return nil
  end
  local behavior = "content-visible" -- or "content-hidden", as necessary
  local condition = {
    {"when-profile", "production"},
    -- other conditions
  }
  return quarto.ConditionalBlock({
    node = div, -- this is the div containing your content
    behavior = behavior,
    condition = condition
  })
end

Your question highlights two quarto shortcomings we hope to address:

1. We should offer an API to process both markdown or "raw Pandoc AST" into custom AST nodes, so the div syntax works in user filters
2. We should document the APIs for constructing Custom AST nodes.

[coatless]

Thanks for the details on the custom parsing. I modified it a little bit and incorporated it into an extension geared to replace one of my existing RMarkdown-specific packages.

https://github.com/coatless/quarto-assign

The only other showstopper is being able to have all profiles rendered when the button is clicked. Is there a good way to specify this inside of the _extension.yml?

[cscheid]

The only other showstopper is being able to have all profiles rendered when the button is clicked

That's a question for the IDE folks, either RStudio or VS Code.