Controlling output format

With controlling output format, it is possible to:
 * Setting basic modes of output formatting.
 * Set advanced modes of output formatting (complete control over output).
 * Generate simple/quick tabular output.
 * Generate advanced tabular output (or format though special surrogate formatting templates).
 * Apply formatting to and around lists with headings (and their contents).
 * Arranging article lists in columns and rows.
 * Control (or rewrite) the way article names are displayed.

In the examples that follow, the DPL output has been kept small to reduce page load time and page size, most notably using,  ,  , and.

General approach to output formatting
The general approach to output formatting is two-fold:


 * 1) There are a couple of simple predefined output formats which generate lists of articles.
 * 2) * You will understand their meaning directly from reading.
 * 3) There is a mode called userformat which puts complete control into your hands.
 * 4) * You will understand their meaning directly from reading.

mode
Syntax:

where modename can be one of:


 * – outputs an unordered list – HTML tag – (default).
 * – outputs an ordered list – HTML tag.
 * – outputs a list using newlines and HTML tags to separate each item.
 * – outputs a list using symbols defined by the  parameter to separate items.
 * – outputs resulting articles in a way category pages are shown ( must be used with one of the values: ; ; ; or ).
 * – leaves output control completely to the user. See parameters  and  ; in this mode, DPL3 offers built-in variables which must be referenced in the output format description provided by the user.   is essential to have complete control over the output.

For advanced use of DPL3, it is important to understand. Note that this mode is automatically implied when  or   are used.

mode 'ordered', 'unordered', 'none'
Example:

For space and comparison reasons, this example has been modified and put inside wikitable syntax to display the results side-by-side, rather than one after the other. See the actual example page for the proper (simplified) result, or test it in a sandbox (link at the right). The below examples create abbreviated lists of articles in Category:Fruit examples, each formatted either using an list (numbered), an  list (bulleted), or the  list style (no list item markers).

mode 'category'
Example:

Note: You must use  with one of:   /   /   /   with this option.

inlinetext
Syntax: , where wikitext is the text to be set.

The default formatting is  which results in   except when   where   is empty by default.

Notes:
 * To get normal "breaking spaces" (and not the NON-breaking spaces) use.
 * Extra white spaces are stripped by DPL3 from the beginning and end of wikitext. To show one or multiple spaces, use one or multiple, or use nowiki tags   which has the same effect as.
 * Bullets can be displayed with either  or *.

Example:

Result:

mode 'userformat'
While the standard output formats are meant to be used for fast generation of simple page lists, the approach aims at transcluding contents from other pages and requires some effort to understand. There is a system of three tags which are used to enclose (a) the whole output, (b) each item, (c) each transcluded section of an item. A fourth tag is used to separate values between items of one section which occur more than once.

We assume that we have two documents and  which use templates  and  with varying arguments; while  is being used once within each document,  is used several times. In very short notation, the structure might look as follows:  A: x(a) y(3) y(5) B: x(b) y(4) y(1) y(2)

The following DPL parameters are used to define a set of tags which are used to construct the output: The arguments of the above statements can contain references to. So might contain a reference like   to output the page name. See  for more details on variable substitution.

Now think of the following page inclusion statement:  includepage={x}.dpl,{y}.dpl

The output then looks like this:  liststart itemstart sec-1-start x.dpl(a) sec-1-end sec-2-start y.dpl(3) multi-sep y.dpl(5) sec-2-end itemend itemstart sec-1-start x.dpl(b) sec-1-end sec-2-start y.dpl(4) multi-sep y.dpl(1) multi-sep y.dpl(2) sec-2-end itemend listend

Assuming that the tags (,, etc.) contain wiki syntax for table definitions and defines a horizontal line, the output might look like this:  +--+-+ |      |          | y.dpl(3) | | A   | x.dpl(a) |      | |     |          | y.dpl(5) | +--+--+--+ |      |          | y.dpl(4) | |     |          |      |  |  B   | x.dpl(b) | y.dpl(1) | |     |          |      |  |      |          | y.dpl(2) | +--+--+--+

In some situations, however, an output table may be desired where each of the calls of template is used to create a separate output row. Using a sortable table, the output could then be easily rearranged.  +--+-+      +--+-+  |  A   | x.dpl(a) | y.dpl(1) |       |  B   | x.dpl(b) | y.dpl(1) | +--+-+      +--+-+  |  A   | x.dpl(a) | y.dpl(2) |       |  B   | x.dpl(b) | y.dpl(2) | +--+-+      +--+-+  |  B   | x.dpl(b) | y.dpl(3) |       |  A   | x.dpl(a) | y.dpl(3) | +--+-+      +--+-+  |  B   | x.dpl(b) | y.dpl(4) |       |  A   | x.dpl(a) | y.dpl(4) | +--+-+      +--+-+  |  B   | x.dpl(b) | y.dpl(5) |       |  B   | x.dpl(b) | y.dpl(5) | +--+-+      +--+-+

There is a special parameter called  which can be used to mark one section of the   statement as "dominant" (in our example: "dominantsection=2" as  is the second argument of the   statement). Only one dominant section can be used in a DPL3 statement. Marking a section as "dominant" only makes sense if there are multiple calls of the same template (or multiple page sections/chapters with the same heading) in the documents. Each piece of content in the dominant section generates an individual output row with the values of all other columns being repeated.

format
Syntax:

where, , and  are wiki tags used to separate the list items:
 * and define an outer frame for the whole list.
 * and build an inner frame for each article item.

Notes:
 * is an alias for.
 * The  command is very flexible, but somewhat complicated. To create tabular output, also see the   command.
 * Because wiki syntax depends on newline characters,  or   must be used to explicitly insert newline characters into the output.
 * A bullet point list in wiki syntax is defined by a  at the beginning of a line – therefore   or   must be used.
 * A numbered list in wiki syntax is defined by a  at the beginning of a line – therefore   or   must be used.

Example: For space and comparison reasons, this example has been modified and put inside wikitable syntax to display the results side-by-side, rather than one after the other. See the actual example page for the proper (simplified) result, or test it in a sandbox (link at the right). The classical default output of DPL3, an unordered (bulleted) list, can be produced by using a default statement (first example and result). It can also be created using  with the following statements (last example and result). This selects pages that have "ntries" in the title, it excludes pages that have "f" in the title, and it also excludes subpages. The  statement's, , and  arguments are empty, only  is used to manually define a bulleted list followed by the liked page name, which is then applied to each row of output.

Example:

Result:

Notes:
 * You can also use HTML syntax for the tags, although this is discouraged.
 * format  = ,%PAGE%,,

The  parameter can be used to create a table using wiki syntax (note that the parser function syntax   invocation method requires the pipe   characters to be replaced by broken pipe  . Again, as wiki syntax depends on newline characters,   or   must be used to explicitly insert newline characters into the output.

Example:

Result:

Notes:
 * The position of the   syntax starts and formats a row of output, which is then applied to each item in the result set.
 * In the case of results outside the Main namespace, such as in the "Category" namespace, if "Category:" is not desired in the page title/link,  can be used instead.
 * The  parameter, with   and the  /  parameter, can also be used to output table syntax.

Image galleries can also be produced using the format syntax.

Example:

Result:

Variables
As we want to be able to control output completely, we reference article names and other possible output by special :  Note: The above variables are replaced by the corresponding values if they occur within Start or End or within the corresponding tags of the  parameter. 

secseparators
Syntax:

or

In the first syntax variant, specify pairs of tags which correspond to the statement. and are HTML strings or wiki tags which are put around each transcluded section (see ).

In the second syntax variant, specify just one element which is then used as for all sections; in this case the second tag  will be empty for all transcluded sections.

Symbolic replacements of  etc. take place as described in. In addition, the variable  can be used to refer to the section found (works only for page section/chapter headings).

If the same section occurs more than once in an article (or an article includes the same template more than once) all such occurrences are transcluded as a block, and the tags are only put once around the whole block (but see ).

Example:

As mentioned above, a single element can be used in the  statement to apply this as a start tag to all transcluded sections; so it could have also been written as shown in the example below.

Example:

multisecseparators
Syntax:

The tags correspond to the transcluded section (see ).

Symbolic replacements of  etc. take place as described in. In addition, the variable  can be used to refer to the section found (works only for chapter headings). It gives the precise name of each heading, even if a regular expression (double ##) was used in the include statement.

If an article uses the same template more than once, all references are provided with as a separator.

Example:

Result:

Values cannot be formatted within, as formatting can only occur in formatting statements (this can be done in   or  , and  ). Variables can be omitted from the, and instead be placed in these formatting statements, for further formatting.

We can achieve some field formatting by changing some of the above dpl statements:

Example:

Example:

Formatting handled by a surrogate (also known as phantom) template (e.g., Template:DPL parameter.surrogateexample‎‎) applies to both  and.

If separate formatting is required, it needs to be assigned to their respective parameters (as shown in the surrogate, and in the example above if "View result" is clicked). In the surrogate and in the result, it can be seen that a link was applied to the second column in addition to the first, this required the use of a surrogate, though there are simpler ways to accomplish a task as basic as this, see the  and   parameters for more information.

dominantsection
Syntax:

between 1 and the number of arguments in the  statement

If there is only 0 or 1 piece of content for the dominant section, no difference from normal DPL3 behavior is observed.

See the explanations at the top of this document to understand the meaning of dominantsection.

Note: Using  together with   may lead to strange result formatting.

table
Syntax:

The layout is less flexible than the individual use of all of the above parameters, but is probably be sufficient often, especially when used together with.

Parameters automatically set by  are:
 * is configured to produce table definition wiki syntax.
 * is configured to produce table row wiki syntax.
 * The first column always contains a hyperlink to the article of the query result (unless suppressed using '-' in the link header as described below).
 * is configured to produce another table row wiki syntax, for multiple occurrences of the first  argument.
 * For all other arguments:
 * Template parameters – A line break is used (because a table where each template invocation becomes a row in the table may be desired).
 * Page section contents– A line break is used (Note: Formerly a horizontal separation line was noted, but this changed some time ago).
 * Page section contents– A line break is used (Note: Formerly a horizontal separation line was noted, but this changed some time ago).

It does not make sense to use one of the other parameters mentioned, if  is used in a DPL3 statement because their values are overwritten without notice. include = {some template}:param1,#some-section-heading table  =,,tplparam,#sectionheading,#hits format =,,\n%COUNT% This provides a table which contains template parameters, article section/chapter contents, and the usage counter as a third column. Metadata can only be placed AFTER normal contents, the third argument of the  statement adds   to add that value after that column's normal content.
 * There is one exception to this rule, it can make sense to specify the third argument for  combined with  ; therefore, this parameter is NOT overwritten by the   command. The third argument can be used to output metadata like ,   etc., as columns in an output table. To do so, the third parameter must contain wiki syntax for output columns like this:

Important:
 * An  statement is required to use.
 * Each argument of the  statement produces one or more values for the output described by the   statement.
 * For reasons of readability and because the  and   statements correspond, the   statement should directly precede the   statement.

 expects a comma-separated list of arguments:


 * The first argument assigns general properties for the table.
 * It is recommended to make a CSS reference here, using something like, or   if  is defined in the Mediawiki:Common.css document.
 * is the default value if left empty.


 * The second argument is the headline for the first column.
 * A  hyphen in the second argument suppresses the automatically generated first column of output.
 * You can manually create a hyperlink to the article in any other column instead, using, in a   statement, or in a surrogate (also known as phantom) template.
 * If no header text is specified in second position, "Content page" appears.
 * All subsequent arguments specify the column headings, which correspond to the arguments of the  parameter. If a surrogate template is called (like ) in the   statement, as many headlines as the surrogate template produces columns needs to be provided.

Example:

Result:

Example:

Result:

When using surrogate templates (i.e., templates that format a single row of output, called during DPL3 execution, and then applied by DPL3 to subsequent rows), they must be written to produce output according to wiki table syntax. The  parameter already creates the beginning and end of a table, so when entering such a template, we are already at the beginning of a column (i.e., a preceding line with a   has already been put into the output stream). So, start directly with the contents of the first column. To add more columns, use a  on a separate line.

Example:

some output for the first column: |  some output for the next column: |  some output for the next column:

It may sound complicated, but is a huge improvement compared to the native use of,  ,   and.

A typical DPL3 statement using the parameter would contain: include =                           #Section X,   {T1}:param1   ,#Section Y,{T2}.dpl table  = class="sortable", Article,      X   , Template param1 ,     Y    ,T2-a T2-b Note that we have written the above statement in a way to show the correspondence between  and. You can see the first two arguments define the table characteristics and then the first column (for the hyperlink to the article) and headline. Then follow headlines for each argument of. Note that there are two headlines which correspond to the last argument of the  statement (assuming that  outputs two columns). itself might have more or less than 2 arguments – it only matters how many columns are output by ).

Example:

Result:

See: the collection of Generating tabular output (examples) for more table examples, and also  for more information on surrogate template use.

tablerow
Syntax:

where uses the symbol   to precisely position content included by an   statement, within wikitext formatting code.

When it comes to simple tables using, an   statement first tells DPL3 what content to include in each column of a table, the   statement sets corresponding table syntax, styles, separators, table headers, and also determines if the first (automatically generated) column is included or suppressed. The job of the  is to precisely position the column values   of the corresponding , within some supplied formatting for a single row of output. Whatever is supplied for formatting is then re-applied to every row of output.

When defining the formatting, it's possible to start with cell styles/attributes like  (followed by the value  ) or skipping such styles and just adding the value. All columns must be specified, meaning as many entries in the  statement must exist as there are columns in the table. Skipping a column would suppress output for that column completely.

Example:

Result:

Notes:
 * You can add a leading  or   to make sure that the field contents are displayed correctly if it contains wiki syntax that depends on line breaks (e.g., numbered list).
 * See Generating tabular output (examples) for many more examples of  use (and other methods of generating tabular data).

tablesortcol
Syntax:

number is the position of the column that shall be used as sortkey when the result is initially displayed.
 * Column numbering starts with 1;
 * means do not sort; this is the default.
 * Negative numbers are used to sort in descending order; e.g., would sort according to the third column in descending order.
 * Note that the rest of the row after the selected column are also part of the sortkey; so the contents of successive columns may serve as a secondary sort criterion if there are identical values in the selected column.
 * Also note that the whole column contents is taken; this may include hidden contents or markup sequences if column formatting commands were used. For the same reason, numeric contents cannot be expected to sort numerically – sorting is always alphabetical.
 * You can, of course, use something like  or   together with  . The difference is that:
 * Interactive sorting only works after the article has been initially displayed.
 * Interactive sorting tries to guess the content type of column and sorts according to that (date, number, string)
 * If  is not used, the output order of table rows depends on the sort order by which the articles were analyzed. That order depends on other DPL3 commands like  . The default is "alphabetically by title". So, without   table rows appear in alphabetical sequence of the article names where they come from. With   these can be ordered by the column contents itself.

Example:

Result:

headingmode
Syntax:

where modename can be one of:
 * – outputs an ordered (numbered) list – HTML tag
 * – outputs an unordered (bulleted) list – HTML tag
 * – outputs a description list – HTML tag
 * – headings are not displayed, no heading – (default, need not be set)
 * – outputs (heading) sections – HTML tags
 * – outputs heading sections – HTML tags
 * – outputs heading sections – HTML tags
 * – outputs heading sections – HTML tags
 * – outputs heading sections – HTML tags
 * – outputs heading sections – HTML tags

Important notes:
 * If a single category is used to select articles for the result set, and those articles belong to more than one category, all categories they belong to are displayed as headings and the articles themselves will repeat under each category they belong to, unless extra categories are deliberately filtered off with other page selection parameters. The  parameter would have no effect on this behavior because the articles are already distinct to each category (and   is already the default, setting it would not change the result).
 * can be used with multi-column output, but the length of the columns may vary more expected.

Example:

Result:

, which governs the mode of only headings, can also be combined with  or , which can number or bullet the articles under those headings.

Example:

Result:

hlistattr
Syntax:

Example:

If there is one page output for each category, the HTML structure output is:

Result:

Note: To format subsequent elements in the same result set, see also (in the corresponding order since the examples build on one another),  ,.

hitemattr
Syntax:

Example:

If there is one page of output for each category, the HTML structure output is:

Result:

Example:

Result:

Note: To format subsequent elements in the same result set, see also (in the corresponding order since the examples build on one another),.

listattr
Syntax:

Example:

If there is one page output for each category, the HTML structure output is:

Result:

Note: To format subsequent elements in the same result set, see also (in the corresponding order since the examples build on one another).

itemattr
Syntax:

Example:

If there are multiple pages output for each category, the HTML structure output is:

Result:

headingcount
Syntax:

Note: (default is, it need not be set)

userdateformat
Syntax:

where sets the date format.

The may contain letters like "y,Y,m,M,d,D,h,H,i,I,s" for year, month day. Other characters are printed as they are. See the documentation for PHP function date for more details. The  applies to all date/time fields, see the parameters: ,  ,.

Example:

Default:

By default, DPL3 uses "Y-m-d H:i:s" to display date and time. Note that MediaWiki stores all dates/times in UTC format. When displaying a time stamp, DPL3 translates it according to:
 * 1) The timezone preference (difference to UTC/GMT) given by the user in his user settings.
 * 2) If no preference is given, and for all anonymous users, the local time on the server is used.

So, either time based on the user's local time (browser based), or based on the timezone in which the wiki server is running is seen.

The same kind of translation applies to dates specified when selecting articles by revision date/time.

shownamespace
Syntax:

Example:

Result:

Note: In  there is a different way to decide whether output the title with or without namespace is desired; two built-in variables are provided which contain the page name including the namespace  and the base title name. Setting  links to the full page with namespace, but displays the link text without namespace.

escapelinks
Syntax:

Example:

Result:

Notes:
 * You can use this parameter to show images, the images are displayed at the largest size as will fit on the page (which may be larger than is appropriate).
 * Another way to do this is to:
 * Use a format statement, such as:  as in the second example here.
 * Use gallery syntax within a format statement, as in the example here.

titlemaxlength
Syntax:

Example:

Result:

replaceintitle
Syntax:

The search for argument must be an expression which can be used in a PHP preg_replace function call.

To remove the string "demo" in article names, it must be written as:

Example:

Result:

Notes:
 * Standard regexp rules apply.
 * The regexp must start with a non-alphanumeric character – but not necessarily with a backslash! It is a good habit to use  if this character is not needed within the regexp itself.

columns
Syntax:

where is the number of desired columns.

This (if it worked) displays articles in Category:Fruit examples‏‎, a count of three, arranged in 3 columns ( is used to make the table width 100%).

Workaround example:

Workaround result:

Note: In  the outer tags from   are repeated for each column. This means that such a statement could create tables within columns, with something like: addpagesize=true ordermethod=size listseparators={|class="wikitable sortable" id=2\n!Rank\n!Article\n!Bytes\n|-,\n|%NR%.\n|%PAGE%\n|style="text-align:right;|%SIZE%,\n|-,\n|}

rows
Syntax:

where is the number of desired rows.

In, the outer tags from   are repeated for each column. Thus, long lists can be created where the table heading is repeated from time to time.

This would (if it worked) list the largest articles in Category:Fruit examples‏‎, arranged in two rows (dividing the list of lines equally into 2). Each row consists of a table which has itself three columns: rank, article name, and size.

Example:

Result:

rowsize
Syntax:

where is the desired row size.

In  the outer tags from   are repeated after each group of   output lines. Thus, long lists can be created where the table heading is repeated in regular intervals.

The (if it worked) lists all articles in Category:Fruit examples‏‎. After each group of 3 entries (article names) the table heading is repeated. It may be useful to set the width of the column with the article names explicitly, so that the tables in each row have equal width.

Example:

rowcolformat
Syntax:

where are the desired (allowed) HTML tags to set.

Example:

This (if it worked) lists articles in Category:Fruit examples, displayed in 3 columns, with more space around the columns.

The ideal way to use  is to assign a CSS class to the DPL3 table, which has been defined in the MediaWiki:Common.css article.

Example:

In MediaWiki:Common.css article, something like the following might be written:

.dpl3columns td { background: #f2f2f2; padding: 0.5em; border: 3px; width: 33%; }