Variables

[RickCogley]

Hi, are there any variables besides "year" available? Searched but didn't find, so I appreciate any pointer.

[geoffreymcgill]

No other system variables are available at this time, but this is functionality we plan to expand heavily in the future.

We have content partials under development. Once that is in place, adding system variables and even custom user defined variables will be possible.

[RickCogley]

Thanks, that'll be cool

[geoffreymcgill]

The new partials and variables support is going to be amazing. A full content templating language is being integrated. Functions for arrays including looping, string manipulation, math, regex, date, etc.

You will be able to define global custom variables in your retype.yml or at a page level in the page metadata. Arrays of custom object variables can be defined too. Variables can be passed into partials or other components. Partials can be nested. Global variables can be used to set configs in the page metadata, including the key names.

---

The following demonstrates configuring a simple partial with an alert component whose variant is set in a custom global variable and the text message is passed into the partial from a custom variable set in the page metadata:

retype.yml

data:
  customVariant: success

_includes/custom-alert.md

!!!{{ customVariant }} {{ $.title | string.capitalize }}
{{ $.text }}
!!!

sample.md

---
data:
  customText: This is custom alert message defined in a variable.
  customTitle: Holy cow!
---
# Sample

{{ include "custom-alert" text:customText title:customTitle }}

The sample above would render as:

---

This new functionality is going to unlock a whole new level of content authoring flexibility. Essentially programmable content.

Will be interesting to see how authors will leverage this new functionality.

The plan is to include in Retype v1.12.0.

[geoffreymcgill]

Passing custom variables in the command line might already be possible using --override, although I haven't tested yet.

We could also add a specific --data option. We will keep this in mind as we build out the feature.

Setting var values using Environment variables is also being investigated.

[DannyBen]

Setting var values using Environment variables is also being investigated.

I was about to suggest it. This will be great.

[geoffreymcgill]

The new templating (includes, variables, functions, conditionals, looping, etc) functionality is finally complete, and it's awesome.

This was a massive piece of work that touched every aspect of the Retype engine and took waa-a-a-a-aay longer than we had hoped, but it's now basically ready to go. We still want to do another in depth round of testing before releasing a preview.

As always, performance was the priority. We were able to make performance improvements throughout Retype in addition to layering on the new templating engine, and Retype is still screaming fast.

The underlying templating engine is Scriban which supports Liquid style syntax. Everything (plus more) that is supported by Scriban and Liquid is now supported within Retype. It's an extremely powerful and flexible templating system.

We still have the task of documenting the new templating functionality, although just because of the sheer enormity of what is now possible, that documentation is going to have to roll out over some time. We'll get the basics documented and some advanced samples, then link off to the Scriban docs for the full API.

Please keep in mind that is for content templating only, not the website wrapper template. We're hoping to support complete website templating in a future release.

[geoffreymcgill]

Templating is now available in the Retype v2.0.0-preview release. If you have some time, we would certainly appreciate your feedback on the preview release before we go live with v2.0.0 (likely next week).

[amarcolini]

Is there now any documentation for this feature? It looks really cool and I want to give it a try, but I'm not sure how to get started.

[dipbhi]

@geoffreymcgill,
Just tried using it exactly as your sample, but for me it's printing {{ custom-alert text="{{ custom-text }}" title="{{ custom-title }}" }} on the page instead of showing the alert defined in the custom-alert partial.

Using retype version 2.4.0.

Are the partials supposed to be in a specific directory?

Noticed these two warnings in the console as well:

WARNING: [xyz.md:8,17] Error while parsing assign expression: Expression is only allowed for a top level assignment in: <target_expression> = <value_expression>
WARNING: [xyz.md:8,42] Error while parsing assign expression: Expression is only allowed for a top level assignment in: <target_expression> = <value_expression>

[geoffreymcgill]

I just ran across this old templating sample and corrected to use the final release syntax, see

#213 (comment)