Metadata

Metadata is scoped data injected into specific pages through the _data.json file.

Why?

Sometimes you might want to separate concerns, or keeping all the data global in one file is not advantageous. File Metadata is perfect for this.

Your files named _data.json are special and make data available to templates.

Example

myproject/
  ├ harp.json               <-- Global metadata goes here
  ├ index.jade
  └ articles/
      ├ _data.json           <-- Article metadata goes here
      ├ hello-world.jade     <-- hello world article
      └ hello-brazil.jade    <-- hello brazil article

Your application could have several _data.json files, each living in their own folder. You can also include a _data.json inside the root directory in order to set the meta data for pages living in your root directory.

Your _data.json file may contain the following…

{
  "hello-world": {  <-- available everywhere as public.articles._data
    "title": "Hello World.",
    "date": "2013-02-28"
  },
  "hello-brazil": {
    "title": "Hello Brazil.",
    "date": "2013-03-04"
  }
}

Because hello-world matches the filename, these variables will be made available in the hello-world.jade template when being served. This object is also available in all the templates as public.articles._data.hello-world.

Any metadata in the harp.json file (or _harp.json) will be overwritten by the local metadata in the _data.json file. This allows you to, for example, specify a title for the entire site, but to overwrite it when you are on an individual project page. (There’s an example recipe for this, too.)

There’s no need to include the file extension in your _data.json. "hello-world.jade" : { … }, for example, will throw an error.

In our index template we may iterate over all the articles to create an article listing.

for article, slug in public.articles._data
  a(href="/articles/#{ slug }")
    h2= article.title

Also see