'navigation' Object not containing enough page information.

[niklasfink]

Hi, I wanted to use the navigation (or files) object to get page information of sub pages.

With this, I want to build a rich overview page of all sub-pages including some of their meta data. The function would be similar to the Excerpt Macro in Confluence.

Another example (to try to explain the goal of this) would be building an index of all sub-pages within a specific folder. For this, you need the Title of the page and the URL and can the build a link. However, at the moment, I don't see how this should work.

Issue

The pages (List[Page]) within the navigation object neither contain the Title of a page, nor any meta data in most cases. It seems like they only contain this information the further down in the directory tree they are.

Jinja Template Example

{% for page in navigation.pages if page.parent.title == "Folder1" %}
    Title: {{ page.title }} // URL: {{ page.url }} // Meta: {{page.meta.metavar|default('None')}}
{% endfor %}

Pictures

In the following picture, we only get the details of File0 (the current page) and the other pages don't show any detail infos, except the URL.

In the next picture, we have it working as expected. The details of all sub-pages of Folder1 are retrieved.

What's the issue here or how can this be done differently? From my perspective, navigation.pages should have the same content, independent to where it is used in the file tree.

[github-actions]

Welcome to this project and thank you!' first issue

[fralau]

Hello, I believe you could do that. But this would be more a mkdocs issue wouldn't it?

https://www.mkdocs.org/dev-guide/themes/#config

[fralau]

@niklasfink Is it still an issue?

[niklasfink]

I don’t think this is generally solved, but I also don’t know whose responsibility it would be to implement this.
I worked around it by modifying the rendering queue.

[fralau]

Some ideas:

• Keep into account that the navigation is being built while mkdocs is rendering the pages, unless you defined your page structure in the config file (mkdocs.yaml). So when you are rendering the first page, the second and third have not been read yet.
• Confluence's macros are rendered at runtime, after the navigation has been calculated.
• So if you want to make an equivalent of the Excerpt macro, either you work with a complete navigation when the page is being rendered, or... you need a second pass. Which might not be easy to implement, on a static website.

It seems to me that the question should be asked to the mkdocs team?