haskellhakyll

Sort Hakyll item list by a custom field


I want to add a custom field to my posts called coolness, like this:

---
title: Something
coolness: 10
---

and then I want to sort my posts by coolness. How do I do that? I know I can sort by date: posts <- recentFirst =<< loadAll "posts/*" using recentFirst, but that's built-in and I don't really know how to modify it to sort by coolness instead because it uses some custom method to find out what date a post has.


Solution

  • We want to use MonadMetadata and getMetadataField from Hakyll to read the coolness, then parse it to a number, and sort by that number.

    Stealing heavily from The source for recentFirst, you could write something like:

    {-# LANGUAGE TupleSections #-}
    import Hakyll
    import Control.Monad (void, (>>=), liftM)
    import Data.Ord (comparing)
    import Data.List(sortOn, sortBy)
    import Data.Maybe(fromMaybe)
    import Text.Read(readMaybe)
    import Data.Foldable (toList)
    
    -- this parses the coolness out of an item
    -- it defaults to 0 if it's missing, or can't be parsed as an Int
    coolness :: MonadMetadata m => Item a -> m Int
    coolness i = do 
        mStr <- getMetadataField (itemIdentifier i) "coolness"
        return $ (fromMaybe 0 $ mStr >>= readMaybe)
    
    byCoolness :: MonadMetadata m => [Item a] -> m [Item a]
    byCoolness = sortByM coolness
      where
        sortByM :: (Monad m, Ord k) => (a -> m k) -> [a] -> m [a]
        sortByM f xs = liftM (map fst . sortBy (comparing snd)) $
                       mapM (\x -> liftM (x,) (f x)) xs
    

    This sorts on the extracted coolness value. It sorts in increasing coolness, so if you want "coolest first" do:

    posts <- reverse <$> (byCoolness =<< loadAll "posts/*")