Dynamic Data Discovery

AKA: Front Matter & Filling in the Gaps

Introduction

Hyde wants to allow developers to write less, and do more. This is also a major difference between HydePHP and JekyllRB. Jekyll will only do what you tell it to do. Hyde, on the other hand, will try to do what you want it to do.

As with all other chapters in this category, you don't need to know about this to use Hyde -- that's the whole point! However, if you're anything like me, you'll likely find this interesting to read about, even if you don't really need to know it.

Hyde makes great use of front matter in both Markdown and Blade files (it's true!). However, it can quickly get tedious and quite frankly plain boring to have to write a bunch of front matter all the time. As Hyde wants you to focus on your content, and not your markup, front matter is optional and Hyde will try to fill in the gaps for you.

If you're not happy with Hyde's generated data you can always override it by adding front matter to your files.

How it Works

Now, to the fun part: getting into the nitty-gritty details of how Hyde does this!

To make things simple the dynamic data is created in a special stage where the page object is being created. If you have not yet read the page models chapter you might want to do so now. You might also want to read about the autodiscovery lifecycle for some context as to when this happens.

The factory pipeline, in short

After basic information about the page has been gathered, such as the source file information and the front matter, the page model is run through a series of factories. These are just classes that work around the limited data that is available at this point and will generate the rich data used to make your Hyde page awesome.

There are a few factory classes. The one we will be looking at here is the HydePageDataFactory class, which is responsible for data applicable to all page models. Complex structures and data only relevant to some page types have their own factories, making the code more modular and maintainable.

In-depth Overview of a Page Factory

Let's take a look at how Hyde will discover the title of a page as an example. Since this is something used by all pages, this discovery is done in the HydePageDataFactory class.

Factory data input

The factory gets one input, a CoreDataObject class. Think of this like a DTO (Data Transfer Object) that holds immutable data known from the start of the page construction process. It also has all the information needed to identify the page and its source file. Here's a simplified version of the class:

class CoreDataObject
{
    public readonly FrontMatter $matter;
    public readonly Markdown|false $markdown;
 
    public readonly string $pageClass;
    public readonly string $identifier;
    public readonly string $sourcePath;
    public readonly string $outputPath;
    public readonly string $routeKey;
}

Processing the known data

Now that we have the input we pass it to the factory, where a simple algorithm is used to find the best title for the page.

private function findTitleForPage(): string
{
    return $this->matter('title')
        ?? $this->findTitleFromMarkdownHeadings()
        ?? Hyde::makeTitle(basename($this->identifier));
}

As you can see, we are using the null coalescing operator (??) to return the first non-null value. We always want the user to be able to set any data explicitly, so we first check the front matter in all factory methods.

If no title is set in the matter the method will return null, and Hyde will try the next step which is to search the headings. If that fails, the last step will generate a title from the file name. This ensures that no matter what, we always have a title.

Injecting the data into the page

Once the data has been discovered, it is injected into the page object. This is rather unglamorous but is mentioned here for completeness. It's pretty simple. The factory will always return an array of the computed data, where the keys always match the property names on the page object, so we just need to loop over the array and set the properties.

foreach ($data->toArray() as $key => $value) {
    $this->{$key} = $value;
}

And that's pretty much it! Hyde will do this for all the data it can discover, freeing you to focus on your content.