[Feature Request] Wildcards in navigation content lists

[jmbuhr]

In the render targets yaml it is possible to specify targets using wild cards (https://quarto.org/docs/projects/quarto-projects.html#render-targets). This would also be very handy for specifying content layouts in the sidebar, e.g.

  sidebar:
    - id: hello
      style: floating
      title: Hello
      contents:
        - section: Hello
          contents:
             - hello/*.md

[dragonstyle]

This is great suggestion - we'll definitely take a look...

[fire]

I have a list of 30-50 files and it is impractical for me to write a script to force generate the contents list via.. a yml template engine.

[dragonstyle]

We haven't yet gotten to this for the sidebar / navigation, but we are just finishing up a listing feature that will allow you to generate pages with tables, grids, etc... of items generated from a glob. Something like

---
title: "Lab Reports"
toc: false
listing: 
  - contents: "reports/*.qmd"
    type: table
---

This should be landing shortly- any chance it will help out?

[fire]

The use case is I have a 50 architectural decision (SOP) entries listed by time and I wanted to make each reachable by navigation.

I'm not sure. I think the generate pages feature can help me generate a single page table of contents that can be linked as a single entry in the sidebar.

[dragonstyle]

Correct, the listing page would let you create a page with a table of the documents (which will have some other nice features like sorting, filtering, and pagination). In this case, the page appear in the navigation (either the navbar or sidebar), but the individual documents would not. Definitely not the same as generating the navigation structure using the glob, but may work better for use cases, especially when trying to scale to large numbers of documents...

---
title: "Lab Reports"
toc: false
listing: 
  - contents: "posts/*.qmd"
    type: table
    page-size: 10
page-layout: full
---

produces:

[fire]

I can see it being helpful. Ping the thread when it's released.

[dragonstyle]

Will do!

[fire]

I tried it a bit. Here are some comments from peers.

@lyuma

There is an issue of clutter.
the new system doesn't show status or have a filter
you could add the status in the title, then you can search for open or something
I guess it depends on the ultimate goal of this. With the status as it is, it's a bit more like a library: as in, information dump of all sorts of ideas

yeah maybe it can just concatenate proposal Date (from filename), Title, Status (open,accepted,etc)
that might solve the issue I had

[jjallaire]

A bit more context would be useful (perhaps a screenshot of the display that your colleague is referencing). Filtering and sorting is built in to the system, and you definitely can have custom fields (e.g. "Status"). We'll be posting the docs for this within the next couple of weeks.

[fire]

From my usage over the last week, the biggest problem of the wildcard list is that the date is using the git timestamp and not the title sorting. This is a problem because of moves the git stamps are scrambled.

[dragonstyle]

That is definitely not desirable, especially as the default (we intend for that to be sorted in filename order in this case). I'll fix this.

I'll do this right away, but as a preview for the listing feature and In the meantime, you can control the default sort order of the items in the listing page using:

listing:
  sort: 
    - "title asc"

Where sort holds an array of strings of the form <fieldname asc|desc>.

[dragonstyle]

Ok, we now will default sort using the title as of this commit def05c7. You can still specify custom sorts if you'd like, but at least the default case will no longer be so seemingly random.

Thanks for letting us know about this!

[fire]

I wonder if this is valid?

listing:
  sort: 
    - "FileName asc"

[dragonstyle]

Right now it is not (because of case senstivity). I have a todo to provide a helpful message if you attempt to sort by a non-existent field.

This should work:

listing:
  sort:
    - "filename asc"

[dragonstyle]

Ok we have a first pass the documentation on listings available for you to check out here:

https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-listings.html

Hopefully it is sufficiently flexible to be useful in this scenario. Happy to keep answering questions or making corrections / bug fixes if you find them!