Re: [nanoc] Combining multiple data sources to single page

[Denis Defreyne]

Hi Tom,

nanoc does not have an explicit way of merging two items together, but you can still do it in a pretty generic way.

There are multiple approaches to this, but I’ll explain my preferred one. You can do this in three steps:

1. Create an “entry” item in the preprocessing step.
2. Compile foo.md and bar.md using Markdown.
3. Define the rules to let the entry item include the foo and bar items.

The first step would be to create the item in the preprocessor. Items created in the preprocessor act as if they were part of content/ all along. This needs to go in Rules:

preprocess do
items << Nanoc::Item.new(
"<%= render '_merge' %>",
{ :identifiers => [ '/entry/foo/', '/entry/bar/' ] },
"/entry/")
end

The first argument is the content (I’ll come back to this later). The second argument is the metadata: in here I define which items to merge into one. The last argument is the identifier.

The foo and bar items should be compiled using markdown but should not be written, so the Rules looks like this:

compile '/entry/*/' do
filter :kramdown # or bluecloth, rdiscount, …
end

route '/entry/*/' do
nil
end

To let the entry item combine the two items, I‘d suggest creating a partial layout which, when ERB-evaluated, combines the items with identifiers mentioned in the :identifiers attribute. Put this in layouts/_merge.erb:

<%= @item[:identifiers].map { |id| @items[id].compiled_content }.join %>

(This requires nanoc 3.6 because of @items[id].)

The "<%= render '_merge' %>" item content will make sure this layout is invoked. To ensure that happens, the /entry/ item now needs to be ERB-compiled, like this:

compile '/entry/'
filter :erb
end

Also make sure to enable the Rendering helper. Put this in lib/helpers.rb (or whereever you like to place helpers):

include Nanoc::Helpers::rendering

That’s it. I haven’t tested it, so your YMMV, but that is the gist of it!

Denis



On 22 Feb 2013, at 03:39, t...@atomeye.com wrote:

> I'm somewhat new to Nanoc and am try to figure out how I can combine multiple Markdown files and output it to a single index.html page.
>
> My content dir looks like this:
>
> content/
> entry/
> foo.md
> bar.md
>
> And I'd like foo.md and bar.md to compile first with Markdown but merge together, one after the other, in the output. It's that second part I'm having trouble with.
>
>
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[Bingo Du]

Hi, I find this post very useful, but after trying for hours, I find it not working in Nanoc 4 which is the newest version.

 I have do some investigation and modification to make it work, however, the final results is not as expected. 

Exactly I want to do the same thing as Tom has decribed, merge or combine multiple items/files into one single page.

Can anyone help? Great thanks!