Controlling output format

You can select one of several default formats or define your own format ("=userformat"); output can be grouped in columns or rows.

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

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.
 * You will understand their meaning directly from reading.
 * 1) There is a mode called  which puts complete control into your hands.
 * This is somewhat complicated.

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 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 sec-1-start might contain a reference like to output the page name. See for more details on variable substitution.
 * = liststart,itemstart,itemend,listend
 * = sec-1-start,sec-1-end,sec-2-start,sec-2-end, .., ..
 * = multi-sep

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

The output will then look 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, you may want to create an output table where each of the calls of template is used to create a separate output row. Using a sortable table you could then easily rearrange the output.  +--+-+      +--+-+  |  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 you can use to mark one section of your  statement as "dominant" (in our example: "=2" as  is the second argument of our  statement). You can only have one dominant section in a DPL statement. Marking a section as "dominant" only makes sense if you have multiple calls of the same template (or multiple chapters with the same heading) in your documents. Each piece of content in the dominant section will generate an individual output row with the values of all other columns being repeated.

As all of the above is not very easy to understand, there are additional DPL commands which make it fairly easy to create tabular output.

mode
Syntax:

modename can be one of:


 * unordered: outputs an unordered list &mdash; HTML tag &mdash; (default)
 * ordered: outputs an ordered list &mdash; HTML tag
 * none: outputs a list using newlines and HTML tags to separate each item
 * inline: outputs a list using symbols defined by the parameter to separate items
 * category: outputs resulting articles in a way category-pages are shown (you must use  with one of:   /   /   /   with this option).


 * userformat: will leave output control completely to the user; see parameters and ; in this mode DPL offers built-in variables which must be referenced in the output format description provided by the user. '"=userformat" is quite important to have complete control over the output.

For advanced use of DPL it is important to understand "=userformat". Note that this mode is automatically implied when or  are used.

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

mode 'category'
Example:

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

inlinetext
Syntax: , with wikitext as some wiki text; default is  except for "=userformat" where  is empty by default.

If you want normal "breaking spaces" (and not the NON-breaking spaces) you should use.

Extra whitespaces are stripped by DPL from the beginning and end of wikitext. If you want 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:

format
Syntax:

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

Notes:
 * is an alias for.
 * The command is very flexible, but somewhat complicated. If you want to create tabular output, also see the  command.
 * Because wiki syntax depends on newline characters, \n or ¶ must be used to explicitly insert newline characters into the output.

Example:

Note: A bullet point list in wiki syntax is defined by a * at the beginning of a line &mdash; therefore we have to use a special symbol \n or ¶ to refer to the beginning of a new line of wiki text. Replace the * with a # and you will get a numbered list. and are empty (note that we start with a comma, note the two commas at the end), the  tag is used to create a new line with an initial   followed by the page name, written as a link.

Example:

Result:

Important: You can also use HTML syntax for the tags, although this is discouraged. category = Number examples linksto = Two 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:

Image galleries can also be produced using the format syntax:

Example:

Variables:

As we want to be able to control output completely, we reference article names and other possible output by special :


 * - the current article sequence number (starting from 1)
 * - the name of the article (including namespace)
 * - the internal unique numeric ID of the article page
 * - the physical path to an image (based on hash values, e.g., 5/5d/myImage.jpg)
 * - the name of a page which was used within the selection criteria (only applies to and )
 * - the name of an image which was used within the selection criteria (only applies to )


 * - the title of the page (without the namespace)
 * - the namespace of the page


 * - the article size (requires "=true")
 * - a font size number which is based on the article size (logarithm of square root of counter)
 * - the usage counter (requires "=true")
 * - a font size number which is based on the usage counter (currently this is the logarithm of the usage counter)
 * - similar to, but based on the logarithm of the square root of the usage counter


 * - the date selected, e.g., ; requires "=true" or similar; the formatting of the date can be influenced using =
 * - the user who changed the document last; requires "=true"


 * - the user who made a contribution; requires "=true"
 * - the number of bytes changed; requires "=true"
 * - an asterisk bar to indicate the amount of change; requires "=true"


 * - a pipe-separated list of links to all categories to which the article belongs (requires "=true")
 * - a bullet point list of links to all categories to which the article belongs (requires "=true")
 * - a comma-separated list of all categories to which the article belongs (requires "=true")


 * - the name of the revision of the article; only accessible if the DPL query selects pages based on revision dates


 * - the external hyperlink found as a consequence of the statement

These variables will be replaced by the corresponding values if they occur within Start or End or within the corresponding tags of the "=" parameter.

In addition there are some symbolic variables which can ONLY be used in and :
 * - number of articles in the result set
 * - total number of articles in the result set, regardless of count limits; will only be calculated if used
 * - the current DPL version


 * - contains the amount of time (in seconds + milliseconds) spent within DPL; this can be helpful if you observe slow response times for wiki pages that contain DPL statements. Example: 2 (2009/06/13 09:27:43) would mean that DPL spent two seconds of the whole response time, starting at the time given in brackets.


 * ,, , - namespace and title of the first / last article in the result set; the information is intended to be used for page scrolling
 * - set by the URL parameter ; it is passed to the scroll helper template which uses it to produce its links for scrolling

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 will be put around each transcluded section (see ).

In the second syntax variant, specify just one element which will then be 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 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 occurences will be transcluded as a block and the tags will only be put once around the whole block (but see ).

Example:

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

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 will give you the precise name of each heading even if you used a regular expression (double ##) in the include statement.

If an article uses the same template more than once, you will get all references 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 ). 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 phantom template (e.g., Template:DPL parameter.surrogateexample‎‎) will apply 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 you click "View result"). In the surrogate and in the result, you can see 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 your "=" statement

If there is only 0 or 1 piece of contents for the dominant section, you will see no difference from normal DPL behaviour.

Example:

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 statement is a shortcut which implicitly sets certain values for other DPL parameters, namely,  / , , and.

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

If you use in a DPL statement, it does not make sense to use one of the other options mentioned because their values will be overwritten without notice. There is one exception to this rule: It can make sense to specify the THIRD argument for in combination with. Therefore, this parameter is NOT overwritten by the command. The third argument can be used to output meta data like, etc. as columns in an output table. If you want to do so, the third parameter must contain wiki syntax for output columns like this: include = {some template}:parm1,#some heading table  =,,tplparm,chapter,#hits format =,,\n%COUNT% Do not forget to escape the '|' symbol if your DPL statement uses parser function syntax. You will get a table which contains template parameters, chapter contents and the usage counter as a third column. Meta data can only be placed AFTER normal contents, as we use the THIRD parameter of the statement.

The use of requires an  statement which should, for reasons of readability, directly precede the  statement). Each argument of the  statement will produce one or more columns in the output table described in the  statement.

 expects a comma-separated list of parameters:


 * The first parameter will be used to describe general parameters for the table
 * it is recommended to make a CSS reference here, using something like or  if mytable is defined in the Mediawiki:Common.css document.
 * is the default value. Use double-quotes to specify multiple classes, e.g.,.


 * The second parameter is the headline for the first column.
 * The first column will automatically contain a reference to the article, so something like Article should be o.k.
 * is the default value.
 * if you use a single (dash), the column with the hyperlink to the article will be suppressed. You can supply a hyperlink to the article in any other column if you use  within a phantom template.


 * All subsequent parameters are column headings which correspond to the arguments of the parameter. Note that if you call a phantom template (like ) in the include statement, you will have to provide as many headlines as the phantom template produces columns.


 * will be set to userformat


 * will be configured to produce wiki syntax which defines a table


 * will be configured to produce wiki syntax which creates a table row. The first column will always contain a hyperlink to the article of the query result (except you set the link header to '-' as described above.


 * will be configured to produce wiki syntax which creates another table row for multiple occurrences of the first argument. For all other arguments a linebreak will be used if we are dealing with template parameters and a horizontal separation line will be used when dealing with chapter contents. The background for this is the following: If you have an article which calls the same template several times, you may want to have a table where each template invocation becomes a row in your table.

When using phantom templates (i.e., templates which are called during DPL execution instead of the original template) they must be written to produce output according to wiki table syntax. 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 in 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 DPL statement using the parameter would contain: include =                         #Chapter X,{T1}:parm1,#Chapter Y,{T2}.dpl table  = class=sortable, Article,      X   ,     t-p  ,     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 parameters which define the table characteristics and a headline for the hyperlink to the article. Then follow headlines for each argument of. Note that there are TWO headlines which correspond to the last argument of the statement (assuming that Template:T2.dpl outputs TWO columns). Template:T2 itself might have more or less than 2 arguments -- it only matters how many columns are output by Template:T2.dpl).

Now look at the examples.

tablerow
Syntax:

Where coldef contains wiki code which uses the symbol '%%' to refer to the corresponding element of an statement.

The statement (which must be used as a prerequisite for ) cares for the basics of table generation. So, when you define a column definition, you only need to specify the code for the field contents itself. You can start with field attributes like "bgcolor" or skip them. You can add a leading \n or ¶ to make sure that the field contents are displayed correctly if it contains wiki syntax that depends on linebreaks (e.g. enumeration list). You must specify all columns. i.e., you must have as many entries in the statement as there are columns in your table. Skipping a column would suppress output for that column completely.

The command is best explained by an example: category=Help titlematch=DPL% count=4 includepage ={DPL Manual}:section,%-1[25] table      =,Title,Sub Title,Last Section (25 chars) tablerow   =style="text-align:center;background-color:lightyellow;"|%%,|%%, category=Help titlematch=DPL% count=4 includepage ={DPL Manual}:section,%-1[25] table      =,Title,Sub Title,Last Section (25 chars) tablerow   =style="text-align:center;background-color:lightyellow;"|%%,|%%, The following example includes the use of and, both of which were removed in MediaWiki 1.25. category=African Union member states nottitlematch=Sudan addpagecounter=true includepage ={Infobox Country or territory}:area:population_estimate,%0[100] format     =,,\n|style="text-align:right;"|²{#ifexpr:%COUNT%>300¦ %COUNT% ¦%COUNT%}², table      =,Country,Area,Population,Text,#hits tablerow   =style="text-align:right;"|%%,style="text-align:right;"|%%,style="background-color:lightyellow;"| %% ,\n|style="text-align:right;"|%%
 * We select some African countries, we exclude Sudan
 * We acquire a piece of meta data about the articles we will find (in our case the usage counter)
 * We include two named parameters from a template call,
 * We include a short text passage from the text before the first chapter
 * We use the third parameter of to output the usage counter (we could even highlight values above 100 here, for example)
 * We highlight usage values above 300
 * We define a standard wiki table with the article name in the first column (named "Country")
 * We define column headers for transcluded contents and for the usage counter
 * We care for right alignment of the numerical values and define a bgcolor for the text

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;
 * tablesortcol = 0 means do not sort; this is the default.
 * Negative numbers are used to sort in descending order; e.g., -3 would sort according to the third column in descending order.
 * Note that the rest of the row after the selected column will also be 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 you used column formatting commands. For the same reason you cannot expect numeric contents to be sorted 'numerically'—sorting will always be alphabetical.
 * you can, of course, use something like 'class=sortable' 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 a column and sorts according to that (date, number, string)
 * If you do not use the output order of your table rows will depend on the sort order by which the articles were analysed. That order depends on other DPL commands like . The default is "alphabetically by title". So, without  you get the tablerows in alphabetical sequence of the article names where they come from. With  you can order them by the column contents itself.

headingmode
Syntax:

modename can be one of:
 * none &mdash; headings are not displayed, no heading &mdash; (default)
 * unordered &mdash; outputs an unordered list &mdash; HTML tag
 * ordered &mdash; outputs an ordered list &mdash; HTML tag
 * definition &mdash; outputs a definition list &mdash; HTML tag
 * H2 &mdash; outputs sections &mdash; HTML tags
 * H3 &mdash; outputs sections &mdash; HTML tags
 * H4 &mdash; outputs sections &mdash; HTML tags

Example:

category=Terraria Wiki|Community notcategory=Games nottitlematch=%d%|Disambiguations count=7 ordermethod=category,title headingmode=definition mode=ordered This list will output pages that belong to one of the categories Terraria Wiki, Community in a list similar to this (HTML source). The categories are listed in sorted order, and the titles are replaced with the appropriate links ( and are simply used to reduce the output size):

Headingmode can be used with multi-column output, but the length of the columns may in this case vary more than you would expect.

headingcount
Syntax:

default is

listattr
Syntax:

Examples:

itemattr
Syntax:

hlistattr
Syntax:

Example: These examples compare, , and

See also.

hitemattr
Syntax:

Example:

userdateformat
Syntax:

The formatstring 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 userdateformat applies to all date/time fields, see the parameters: ,,.

Example:

userdateformat=Y-m-d (D)

Default:

By default, DPL 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, DPL will translate 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 will be used.

So you will either see a time based on your local time (browser based) or based on the timezone in which the wiki server is running.

The same kind of translation applies to dates you specify when selecting articles by revsion date/time.

shownamespace
Syntax:

Example:

category     = Fruit examples namespace    = Fruit examples_talk shownamespace = false

This list will output all Talk pages in Category:Fruit examples‏‎, listed without the 'Fruit examples talk:' prepended to page names. The namespace 'Talk' refers to talk pages within the main namespace; all other talk namespaces, such as 'Help' or 'Guide' talk pages, would need the format 'namespace_talk'. Only talk pages that have been added to the category (by placing on the talk page) will be listed.

category     = Fruit examples namespace    = Fruit examples_talk shownamespace = false

Note that in "=userformat" there is a different way to decide whether you want to output the title with or without namespace. In "=userformat" two built-in variables are provided which contain the page name including the namespace and the base title name.

escapelinks
Syntax:

Note: You can use this parameter to show images; another way to do this is to use the gallery extension in combination with DPL; there is an example here.

titlemaxlength
Syntax:

replaceintitle
Syntax:

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

Example:

to remove the string "demo" in article names, you must write

Note that standard regexp rules apply. The regexp must start with a non-alphanumeric character -- but not with a backslash! It is good habit to use a '/' if this character is not needed within the regexp itself. Read the php manual to understand the details of regular expressions.

columns
Syntax:

Example:

category	 = Fruit examples nottitlematch	 = %ran% includesubpages = false columns	 = 3 rowcolformat	 = width=100% count		 = 6

Simply displays non-DPL articles and subcategories in Category:Fruit examples‏‎ in 3 columns ( is used to make the table width 100%).

Result: category	 = Fruit examples nottitlematch	 = %ran% includesubpages = false columns	 = 3 rowcolformat	 = width=100% count		 = 6 Note: is currently bugged (possible combatibility issue between Mediawiki 1.31.2 and DPL3 v3.3.3). For a 3-column dpl, css can be used to achieve the desired results: category	 = Help nottitlematch	 = %DPL% includesubpages = false columns	 = 3 rowcolformat	 = width=100% count		 = 6 category		 = Help nottitlematch	 = %DPL% includesubpages = false columns		 = 3 rowcolformat	 = width=100% count			 = 6

More complex example:

In "=userformat" the outer tags from will be repeated for each column.

category	 = Fruit examples‏‎ nottitlematch	 = %ran% includesubpages = false addpagesize	 = true ordermethod	 = size listseparators = {|class=sortablewikitable id=2\n!Rank\n!Article\n!Bytes\n|-,\n|%NR%.\n|%PAGE%\n|style="text-align:right;"|%SIZE%,\n|-,\n|} columns	 = 2 count		 = 6

This output contains a list of the largest non-DPL articles in Category:Fruit examples‏‎. Each column consists of a table which has itself three columns: rank, article name and size.

category	 = Fruit examples‏‎ nottitlematch	 = %ran% includesubpages = false addpagesize	 = true ordermethod	 = size listseparators = {|class=sortablewikitable id=2\n!Rank\n!Article\n!Bytes\n|-,\n|%NR%.\n|%PAGE%\n|style="text-align:right;"|%SIZE%,\n|-,\n|} columns	 = 2 count		 = 6

rows
Syntax:

In "=userformat", the outer tags from will be repeated for each column. Thus, you can create long lists where the table heading is repeated from time to time.

Example:

category	 = Fruit examples‏‎ nottitlematch	 = %ran% includesubpages = false addpagesize	 = true ordermethod	 = size listseparators = {|class=sortablewikitable id=2\n!Rank\n!Article\n!Bytes\n|-,\n|%NR%.\n|%PAGE%\n|style="text-align:right;"|%SIZE%,\n|-,\n|} rows		 = 2 count		 = 6

The output will contain a list of the largest articles in Category:Fruit examples‏‎ that don't have a title that matches "ran" (like Orange), 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.

Result:

category	 = Fruit examples‏‎ nottitlematch	 = %ran% includesubpages = false addpagesize	 = true ordermethod	 = size listseparators = {|class=sortablewikitable id=2\n!Rank\n!Article\n!Bytes\n|-,\n|%NR%.\n|%PAGE%\n|style="text-align:right;"|%SIZE%,\n|-,\n|} rows		 = 2 count		 = 6

rowsize
Syntax:

In "=userformat" the outer tags from will be repeated after each group of  output lines. Thus you can create long lists where the table heading is repeated in regular intervals.

Example:

category	 = Fruit examples‏‎ nottitlematch	 = %ran% includesubpages = false addpagesize	 = true ordermethod	 = size listseparators = {|class=sortablewikitable id=2\n!Rank\n!width=200px|Article\n!Bytes\n|-,\n|%NR%.\n|%PAGE%\n|style="text-align:right;"|%SIZE%,\n|-,\n|} rowsize	 = 3 count		 = 6

The output will contain a list of all articles in Category:Fruit examples‏‎ that don't have a title that matches "ran" (like Orange). After each group of 3 entries (article names) the table heading will be 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. category	 = Fruit examples‏‎ nottitlematch	 = %ran% includesubpages = false addpagesize	 = true ordermethod	 = size listseparators = {|class=sortablewikitable id=2\n!Rank\n!width=200px|Article\n!Bytes\n|-,\n|%NR%.\n|%PAGE%\n|style="text-align:right;"|%SIZE%,\n|-,\n|} rowsize	 = 3 count		 = 6

rowcolformat
Syntax:

Example:

category	 = Help nottitlematch	 = %DPL% includesubpages = false columns	 = 3 rowcolformat	 = cellspacing=20 count		 = 6

There will be more space around the columns than normal. See above for another example. category		 = Help nottitlematch	 = %DPL% includesubpages = false columns		 = 3 rowcolformat	 = cellspacing=20 count			 = 6

The ideal way to use is to assign a CSS class to your DPL table, which has been defined in your mediawiki:Common.css article.

Example:

category	 = Help nottitlematch	 = %DPL% includesubpages = false columns	 = 3 rowcolformat	 = class=dpl3columns count		 = 6

In your Common.css article, you might have written something like

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