Generate a collection using another collection

[Max13]

I'm playing with the blog template, and I would like to generate the categories collection using the posts collections.

Currently, the template contains 1 file in source/_categories for each category known, but as it's possible to loop in the posts collection and look for the categories, it seems not to be possible to use a collection to generate another one (due to the fact that, collections aren't built (yet) during beforeBuild, and it's too late arriving at afterCollections to append a new one in config).

Is there a way or workaround to use a built collection (posts) to populate another (categories) ?

[damiani]

There isn't a built-in way to do this (at the moment), for exactly the reasons you described: collections are only processed once, so your categories collection can't automatically access the contents your posts collection.

There are some ideas for dynamically generating collections discussed here that we're exploring, but haven't yet nailed down an elegant implementation.

In the meantime, though, as mentioned in an issue from the blog template repo, I think @camuthig has a solution that might do what you're hoping: he wrote an afterCollections listener that checks the posts collection and adds any missing categories to the category collection, treating the generated pages as a remote collection (via the items key). Pretty slick solution, check it out.

[Max13]

Thank you for your suggestions

[paulofreitas]

There isn't a built-in way to do this (at the moment), for exactly the reasons you described: collections are only processed once, so your categories collection can't automatically access the contents your posts collection.

There are some ideas for dynamically generating collections discussed here that we're exploring, but haven't yet nailed down an elegant implementation.

In the meantime, though, as mentioned in an issue from the blog template repo, I think @camuthig has a solution that might do what you're hoping: he wrote an afterCollections listener that checks the posts collection and adds any missing categories to the category collection, treating the generated pages as a remote collection (via the items key). Pretty slick solution, check it out.

Unfortunately the aforementioned solution no longer works because buildCollections() method is protected and so is $jigsaw->remoteItemLoader property. Couldn't find a way to achieve the same thing. :/

[camuthig]

@paulofreitas you are correct about the protected status of the $jigsaw->remoteItemLoader. I haven't looked at that particular package for a while, but it seems like the pattern was broken back in 2020.

I dug into it a bit, and it looks like we should be able to access the same loader directly via the container, which is still publicly available on the Jigsaw instance: $jigsaw->app->get(CollectionRemoteItemLoader::class);

I created a branch, and it seems to work on my machine. Would you be willing to try using this branch instead of dev-master and confirm if it resolves your issues? camuthig/jigsaw-blog-default-categories#1

[palexandrite]

@camuthig please, let me know how to make pagination by your extension?

[camuthig]

@palexandrite I haven't worked with this project much in recent years. If you add pagination to the general category layout, does it not add it to the generated ones as well? I'm not immediately sure how to add pagination to the user-defined category layout, so hard for me to quickly say how to add it to the generated ones.

[palexandrite]

@camuthig thank you pretty much for your answer.

About the pagination in Jigsaw, I should make the pagination by YAML syntax in a head of a file (such as an extended layout or a page of a main category according to the Jigsaw documentation. But the pagination shown only for simple pages not for pages of collections.

It would be nice to have a pagination in a page of a collection :-)