I can't seem to make this work. I have tried, in this sandbox, to set values for fields and then display them with the getfield meta syntax, but it doesn't seem to be working.

The getfield, field and ymlfront plugins are enabled. I have tried with and without the following field registration:

# field plugin
# define the fields for the meshmtl project
field_register:
- meta
- hostname
- MAC
- IP

I have tried both the ymlfront directive and the YAML markup (with the --- delimiter), no luck. Any idea what I am doing wrong? -- anarcat

I'm afraid I can't tell from here what the problem could be. It's clear that ymlfront is turned on, or the ymlfront directive in your sandbox page wouldn't be processed. The only thing I can suggest, in order to get more information about what could be going wrong, would be to do a dump of your indexdb file (see inside dot ikiwiki) and see what the data for your sandbox page is. If there is field data there, that would indicate a problem with getfield; if there isn't field data there, that would indicate a problem with field or ymlfront.

Oh, and you only need to register "meta" with field_register; that will enable the data defined by the "meta" plugin to be read by field. Unless "hostname", "MAC" and "IP" are plugins, you don't need to add them to field_register. They can be taken care of by the ymlfront plugin. Perhaps that is the problem?

--KathrynAndersen

I have tried removing the other fields from the declaration, no luck. I did, however, notice the following error in the --rebuild output:

ymlfront parse: Load of sandbox data failed: YAML Error: Stream does not end with newline character
   Code: YAML_PARSE_ERR_NO_FINAL_NEWLINE
   Line: 0
   Document: 0
 at /usr/share/perl5/YAML/Loader.pm line 38

Now that has to be related... In the index.db, there is no ymlfront metadata for the sandbox page... Note that the --- delimiter approach doesn't trigger the warning but doesn't populate the DB either...

Finally note that after adding debugging code, I was able to figure out that this seems to be using the YAML::XS library. I have also traced the data and confirmed that $yml_str does get properly initialized in parse_yml, and it is where the error is generated. So maybe there's something wrong with the YAML library?

Update: well, look here: using YAML::Syck doesn't yield the same error and the metadata actually works! So this is a problem specific to YAML::Any. Hardcoding use YAML::XS or even use YAML::Any fixed the problem for me.

Now delimiters also work, but the output is kind of ugly: it gets parsed as regular markdown makup so the --- makes horizontal lines in the beginning and headings in the end... --anarcat