W D Enumerating Values

Statiq Web has a nifty feature where you can declare a sequence of values to be enumerated within the front matter of a file and it will create additional documents for each of the values.

To use this feature, define a metadata key Enumerate with the values you want to create documents for. Each document will contain the original content and metadata along with an additional Current metadata value.

To illustrate how this works, consider an apple.md file with the following front matter:

Enumerate:
  - Red Delicious
  - Honeycrisp
  - Fuji
  - McIntosh
---
The current apple is <?#= Current /?>.

This will result in 4 documents, one for each of the apples. It uses the shorthand Meta shortcode syntax to output the name of the current enumerated value, but could also have used Razor syntax or another templating format.

Unfortunately this file will also result in all four documents having the same destination path and being written to the same file on disk, overwriting each other. We need to add a DestinationFileName document configuration value to specify the file name of each apple-specific document. Since the destination path also needs to access the "Current" metadata value that the enumeration produces, we'll have to use computed values:

Enumerate:
  - Red Delicious
  - Honeycrisp
  - Fuji
  - McIntosh
DestinationFileName: => $"apple-{Current}.html"
---
The current apple is <?#= Current /?>.

This works well to generate four pages for each of the apples, but what if we also want an index page with all of the apples? We can generate that as well by setting EnumerateWithInput to true. This will include the original input file without a Current value in addition to each of the documents from the enumerated values:

Enumerate:
  - Red Delicious
  - Honeycrisp
  - Fuji
  - McIntosh
EnumerateWithInput: true
DestinationFileName: >
  => Document.ContainsKey("Current") ? $"apple-{Document["Current"]}.html" : "apple.html"
---
@if (Document.ContainsKey("Current"))
{
    <p>The current apple is @Document.GetString("Current")</p>
}
else
{
    <p>All the yummy apples:</p>
    <ul>
        @foreach (string apple in @Document.GetList<string>("Enumerate"))
        {
            <li><a href="apple-@(apple.ToLower())">@apple</a></li>
        }
    </ul>
}

We need to change the DestinationFileName setting in this case since the computed value will need to compile when a Current value isn't available (so it must be accessed through the Document). This example also uses Razor syntax (and would presumably be named apple.cshtml) given the complexity of the logic. The If and ForEach shortcodes could actually handle this in a Markdown file as well, but the syntax wouldn't be as easy to read for the purpose of this example.