foliantcontrib.alt-structure 0.1.0

Extension for Foliant documentation tool to generatealternative chapters structure.

AltStructure Extension

AltStructure is a config extension for Foliant to generate alternative chapter structure based on metadata.

It adds an alt_structure preprocessor and resolves !alt_structure YAML tags in the project config.

Installation

$ pip install foliantcontrib.alt_structure

Configuration

Config extension

Options for AltStructure are specified in the alt_structure section at the root root of Foliant config file:

alt_structure:
    structure:
        - "topic/entity"
        - "additional"
    sep: '/'
    add_unmatched_to_root: false
    registry:
        topic:
            auth: Аутентификация и авторизация
            weather: Погода
        entity:
            test_case: Тест кейсы
            spec: Спецификации

structure : (required) List of structure strings (or lists), each of them representing a branch in chapters structure.

sep : separator for structure strings (ignored for structure lists). Deafault: /

add_unmatched_to_root : if true, all chapters that weren't matched to structure in metadata will be added to root of the chapter tree. If false — they will be ignored. Default: false

registry : A dictionary which defines aliases for chapter tree categories.

Preprocessor

Preprocessor has just one option:

preprocessors:
    - alt_structure:
        create_subfolders: true

create_subfolders : If true, preprocessor will create a full copy of the working_dir and add it to the beginning of all filepaths in the generated structure. If false — preprocessor doesn't do anything. Default: true

Usage

Step 1

Add !alt_structure tag to your chapters in the place where you expect new structure to be generated. It accepts one argument: list of chapters, which will be scanned.

chapters:
    - basic:
        - auth/auth.md
        - index.md
        - auth/test_auth.md
        - auth/test_auth_aux.md
        - weather.md
        - glossary.md
        - auth/spec_auth.md
        - test_weather.md
    - Alternative: !alt_structure
        - auth/auth.md
        - index.md
        - auth/test_auth.md
        - auth/test_auth_aux.md
        - weather.md
        - glossary.md
        - auth/spec_auth.md
        - test_weather.md

You can also utilize YAML anchors and aliases, but in this case, because of language limitation you need to supply alias inside a list. Let's use it to get the same result as the above, but in a more compact way:

chapters:
    - basic: &basic
        - auth/auth.md
        - index.md
        - auth/test_auth.md
        - auth/test_auth_aux.md
        - weather.md
        - glossary.md
        - auth/spec_auth.md
        - test_weather.md
    - Alternative: !alt_structure [*basic]

Step 2

Next you need to define the structure in structure parameter of extension config. It is defined by list of categories, or a string with separators. For example:

alt_structure:
    structure:
        - 'topic/entity'
        - 'additional'

Here topic we may mean different processes which you are describing in the documents, for example, "authorization", "purchases" or "profile editing". entity may be the type of the document, for example, "test case" or "specification". We also add an additional category for some other documents.

These names are arbitrary, you can use any words you like except root and subfolder.

Step 3

After that, open your source md-files and edit their main meta sections. Main meta section is a section, defined before the first heading in the document (check metadata documentation).

file auth_spec.md

---
structure:
    topic: auth
    entity: spec
---

# Specification for authorization

We've added a field structure to the metadata and defined two subfields in it: topic and entity. These keys should be part of your structure, which we defined on step 2.

This chapter will be added to the new structure like this:

- auth:
    - spec:
        - auth_spec.md

If we stated only topic key in metadata:

file auth_spec.md

---
structure:
    topic: auth
---

Then the new structure would be:

- auth:
    - auth_spec.md

Step 4

Now let's fill up registry. We used spec and auth in our metadata for categorizing our articles, but these words don't look pretty in the documents. Registry allows us to set verbose names for these categories in config:

alt_structure:
    structure:
        - 'topic/entity'
        - 'additional'
    registry:
        topic:
            auth: Authentication and Authorization
        entity:
            spec: Specifications

With such registry now our new structure will look like this:

- Authentication and Authorization:
    - Specifications:
        - auth_spec.md

Using preprocessor

By default the !alt_structure tag just adds a new chapter structure to config. This may lead to situation when the same file is mentioned several times in the chapters section (like in our example). While most backends are fine with that — they will just publish the file two times, but MkDocs does not handle this situation well.

That's where you will need to add the preprocessor alt_structure to your preprocessors list. Preprocessor creates a subfolder in the working_dir and copies the entier working_dir contents into it. Then it insets the subfolder name into the beginning of all chapters paths in the alternative structure.

It is recommended to add this preprocessor to the end of the preprocessors list.

preprocessors:
    ...
    alt_structure:
        create_subfolders: true

Note, that the parameter create_subfolders is not necessary, it is true by default. But we recommend to state it anyway for clarity.

After applying the tag, your new structure will now look like this:

- Authentication and Authorization:
    - Specifications:
        - alt1/auth_spec.md

The contents of the working_dir were copied into a subdir alt1, and new structure refers to the files in this subdir.