Can I use this with markdownextradata?

[EdwardMoyse]

Sorry if this is an obvious question, but I have looked in the docs for a while now

I've been using markdownextradata, and in particular really liked that I could just pick up yaml files from _data, rather than making mkdocs.yaml huge. However then I found macros and it seemed like it could do all that markdownextradata could do and more, so I removed that. But it seems like it does not pick up variable definitions from _data. Before I re-install markdownextradata, can anyone confirm that this won't break anything? Or is there a way to do what I want using this plugin?

[fralau]

Thanks for your question. Mkdocs-Macros, by default reads from the extra part of the config file, as markdownextradata -- and indeed that was the inspiration.

For reading external files, there is no default directory, but it should be straghtforward to define your docs/_data directory as the source.

plugins:
    - search
    - macros:
        include_yaml:
          - docs/_data

In haven't checked it; let me know how it went (in case of issue, just read the corresponding part of the documentation).

[EdwardMoyse]

Thank very much for your reply, which was very helpful!

This isn't quite as easy as markdownextra where I didn't need to specify anything in mkdocs.yaml and I could just have:

docs/_data
  gitlab_labels.yaml
  locations.yaml         
  site.yaml

and then the filename is the first part of the scope (i.e. {{locations.athena_basics}} works fine)

But it seems I can recreate this with:

plugins:
  - search
  - macros:
      include_yaml:
        - docs/_data/locations.yaml
        - docs/_data/gitlab_labels.yaml
        - docs/_data/site.yaml

and then also modifying locations.yaml to add the locations scope i.e.

locations:
  athena_basics: athena/basics

(before with markdownextra, locations was not necessary, but this is a one-time change and so not a big deal).

But I'm now getting this error:

_UndefinedError_: 'super_collections.SuperDict object' has no attribute 'data'

from {{site.data.git.branchMainShort}} when the sites.yaml looks like:

site:
  data:
    git:
      athena_git_url: https://gitlab.cern.ch/atlas/athena

Hopefully I'm not missing anything obvious, but I would have thought this would work.

TBH I could just change this naming, so it's not a disaster, but since I'm migrating a large site from Jekyll (and other people will eventually join the effort), it would make things a little easier if this just worked as-is...

[EdwardMoyse]

Never mind - I decided to update the naming ... my impression is perhaps that "site" is a special variable and I cannot use it? But if so, I only figured this out once I had renamed. In any case, it all seems to be working now!

[fralau]

The idea that site could somehow be a "reserved variable" is worth keeping in mind.