The report directive is supplied by the report plugin.
This enables one to report on the structured data ("field" values) of multiple pages; the output is formatted via a template. This depends on the ?field plugin.
The pages to report on are selected by a PageSpec given by the "pages" parameter. The template is given by the "template" parameter. The template expects the data from a single page; it is applied to each matching page separately, one after the other.
Additional parameters can be used to fill out the template, in addition to the "field" values. Passed-in values override the "field" values.
There are two places where template files can live. One is in the /templates directory on the wiki. These templates are wiki pages, and can be edited from the web like other wiki pages.
The second place where template files can live is in the global templates directory (the same place where the page.tmpl template lives). This is a useful place to put template files if you want to prevent them being edited from the web, and you don't want to have to make them work as wiki pages.
OPTIONS
template: The template to use for the report.
pages: A PageSpec to determine the pages to report on.
pagenames: If given instead of pages, this is interpreted as a space-separated list of links to pages, and they are shown in exactly the order given: the sort and pages parameters cannot be used in conjunction with this one. If they are used, they will be ignored.
trail: A page or pages to use as a "trail" page.
When a trail page is used, the matching pages are limited to (a subset of) the pages which that page links to; the "pages" pagespec in this case, rather than selecting pages from the entire wiki, will select pages from within the set of pages given by the trail page.
Additional space-separated trail pages can be given in this option. For example:
trail="animals/cats animals/dogs"
This will take the links from both the "animals/cats" page and the "animals/dogs" page as the set of pages to apply the PageSpec to.
start: Start the report at the given page-index; the index starts from zero.
count: Report only on N pages where count=N.
sort: A SortSpec to determine how the matching pages should be sorted.
here_only: Report on the current page only.
This is useful in combination with "prev_" and "next_" variables to make a navigation trail. If the current page doesn't match the pagespec, then no pages will be reported on.
Headers
An additional option is the "headers" option. This is a space-separated list of field names which are to be used as headers in the report. This is a way of getting around one of the limitations of HTML::Template, that is, not being able to do tests such as "if this-header is not equal to previous-header".
Instead, that logic is performed inside the plugin. The template is given parameters "HEADER1", "HEADER2" and so on, for each header. If the value of a header field is the same as the previous value, then HEADER*N* is set to be empty, but if the value of the header field is new, then HEADER*N* is given that value.
Example
Suppose you're writing a blog in which you record "moods", and you want to display your blog posts by mood.
[[!report template="mood_summary"
pages="blog/*"
sort="Mood Date title"
headers="Mood"]]
The "mood_summary" template might be like this:
<TMPL_IF NAME="HEADER1">
## <TMPL_VAR NAME="HEADER1">
</TMPL_IF>
### <TMPL_VAR NAME="TITLE">
(<TMPL_VAR NAME="DATE">) [[<TMPL_VAR NAME="PAGE">]]
<TMPL_VAR NAME="DESCRIPTION">
Multi-page Reports
Reports can now be split over multiple pages, so that there aren't too many items per report-page.
per_page: how many items to show per report-page.
first_page_is_index: If true, the first page of the report is just an index which contains links to the other report pages. If false, the first page will contain report-content as well as links to the other pages.
Advanced Options
The following options are used to improve efficiency when dealing with large numbers of pages; most people probably won't need them.
maketrail:
Make a trail; if true, then this report is called in "scan" mode and the pages which match the pagespec are added to the list of links from this page. This can be used by another report by setting this page to be a "trail" page in that report.
It is not possible to use "trail" and "maketrail" at the same time. By default, "maketrail" is false.
TEMPLATE PARAMETERS
The templates are in HTML::Template format, just as ?template and ftemplate are. The parameters passed in to the template are as follows:
Fields
The structured data from the current matching page. This includes "title" and "description" if they are defined.
Common values
Values known for all pages:
- page (the current page)
- destpage (the destination page)
- basename (the base name of the page)
- recno (N if the page is the Nth page in the report)
Prev_Page And Next_Page
The "prev_page" and "next_page" variables will give the value of the previous page in the matching pages, or the next page in the matching pages. This is mainly useful for a "here_only" report.
Passed-in values
Any additional parameters to the report directive are passed to the template; a parameter will override the matching "field" value. For example, if you have a "Mood" field, and you pass Mood="bad" to the report, then that will be the Mood which is given for the whole report.
Generally this is useful if one wishes to make a more generic template and hide or show portions of it depending on what values are passed in the report directive call.
For example, one could have a "hide_mood" parameter which would hide the "Mood" section of your template when it is true, which one could use when the Mood is one of the headers.
Headers
See the section on Headers.
First and Last
If this is the first page-record in the report, then "first" is true. If this is the last page-record in the report, then "last" is true.