How to access metadata

[ponychicken]

According to your docs Writer can process MultiMarkdown metadata. How do I access it inside of a template?

[antons]

Currently, the processing option applies to MultiMarkdown, not iA Writer. Metadata is processed inside data-document, but it can’t be accessed by static template files. We would like to improve this in the future.

[mb21]

But can we access it through JavaScript inside the template?

btw, it seems this issue is a duplicate of #6
It would be super handy if you closed issues only if:

• it's a duplicate
• once the bug is fixed in the newest shipping version of iA Writer
• or if the feature request was declined

[antons]

@mb21 That is a good idea. Thank you!

[ponychicken]

@mb21 could you expand on this javascript idea?

[antons]

@mb21 It’s possible to hack it in by extracting metadata from data-document on ia-writer-change, but it’s not trivial.

[thespacedoctor]

@antons Can you give us a little more direction with extracting metadata from data-document on ia-writer-change? I would like to get at my MMD metadata ;)

[marcammann]

Not @antons but what I did was create divs at the top of my document with the interpolated value of the metadata and then accessed the DOM element after the ia-writer-change event.

You'll also have to hide the elements in your styles:

Title: Test

<div class="meta" id="title">[%Title]</div>
<div class="meta" id="brand">[%Brand]</div>

document.getElementById('title').innerText === "Test"

[thespacedoctor]

Thanks @marcammann here's what I ended up doing ...

Let's say I have this metadata at the top of my MMD document:

title: my lovely horse  
author: Neil Hannon  
tags: #horse #song  

NOTE STRICT DOUBLE SPACE AT END OF METADATA LINES

Here's what I did in the end to access hashtags from the metadata.

1. Turn off 'Process Metadata' in preferences so metadata gets rendered within paragraph elements at the top of the body:

   

2. Parse the hashtags within javascript. I was only trying to access the tags, but you can use this method to parse out whatever MMD metadata you want:

   // EXTRACT HASH-TAGS AND PRESENT THEM IN HTML RENDERING
   var processHashTags = function() {
       
       // GET HASH TAGS
       tagSpans = document.getElementsByClassName('hashtag')
       tags = []
       for (var i = 0; i < tagSpans.length; i++) {
           tags.push(tagSpans[i].innerHTML.replace("#", ""));
       }
   
       // METADATA IS IN PARAGRAPHS BEFORE FIRST HEADER
       var metadict = {}
       var c = document.body.childNodes;
       for (var i = 0; i < c.length; i++) {
           if (c[i].nodeName == "H1") {
               break
           }
           if (c[i].nodeName == "P" && c[i].innerHTML.includes(":")) {
               var dataelements = c[i].innerHTML.split("<br>")
               for (var j = 0; j < dataelements.length; j++) {
                   keyvalue = dataelements[j].trim().split(":")
                   metadict[keyvalue[0].trim()]=keyvalue[1].trim()
               }
           }
           c[i].remove();
       }
   
       // ADD LINKED HASH TAGS
       var tagsContainer = document.createElement('div')
       tagsContainer.setAttribute('class', 'tags')
       for (var i = 0; i < tags.length; i++) {
           tagsContainer.innerHTML += '<a href="ia-writer://quick-search?query=%23' + tags[i] + '" class="hashtag">#' + tags[i] + '</a>  '
       }
   
       return [tags, tagsContainer, metadict]
   }

   Note that the tagsContainer element here contains your hashtags that are linked to an iA search for those specific tags (super handy in rendered docs).

3. Finally call processHashTags to access all your metadata (e.g. metadata["title"]) :

   // WAIT FOR THE 'ia-writer-change' EVENT BEFORE ACTING
   document.body.addEventListener('ia-writer-change', function() {
       var dataArray = processHashTags();
       var metadata = dataArray[2];
   })