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+---
+title: Arrow Magic: Metadata Dependent Page Generation
+author: Florian Hars
+---
+
+## Supporting a "published: false" attribute on pages
+
+Many content management systems or blog platforms support
+some kind of workflow that display articles differently or
+not at all depending on which state the article is in, for
+example whether it has a "published" attribute or not.
+Hakyll has no built-in support for anything like this, but since
+its compilers are just arrows, it is easy to implement arbitrary
+metadata dependent behaviour for rendering pages.
+
+Let's start by adding support for a "published" attributes to the
+`simpleblog` example. We want to consider a blog post published if it
+has a `published` metadata element that does not have the value
+`false`. A function to test for this is simple:
+
+~~~~~{.haskell}
+isPublished :: Page a -> Bool
+isPublished p =
+ let published = getField "published" p in
+ published /= "" && published /= "false"
+~~~~~
+
+The next step is to write a function that tags a page with its
+published status, which can be either unpublished or published, using
+the standard `Either` datatype and then transform this function
+into a `Compiler`. The latter can be done with the standard `arr`
+function from `Control.Arrow`, which lifts a function into an arrow:
+
+~~~~~{.haskell}
+isPagePublished :: Compiler (Page a) (Either (Page a) (Page a))
+isPagePublished = arr (\p -> if isPublished p then Right p else Left p)
+~~~~~
+
+For the next processing steps we now need a compiler that takes an
+`Either (Page a) (Page a)` instead of the usual `Page a` as an
+input. But the former can be built up from the latter using some
+standard combinators from the `Control.Arrow` library. The simplest
+one is `|||`, which takes two comilers (arrows) with the same output
+type and returns a new compiler that takes an `Either` of the input
+types of the Compilers as an input. Maybe we just want to render our
+unpublished posts with a big warning that they are provisional, so we
+just want to render the unpublished `Left` pages with another template
+than the published `Right` pages:
+
+~~~~~{.haskell}
+ match "posts/*" $ do
+ route $ setExtension ".html"
+ compile $ pageCompiler
+ >>> isPagePublished
+ >>> (applyTemplateCompiler "templates/embargo-post.html"
+ ||| applyTemplateCompiler "templates/post.html")
+ >>> applyTemplateCompiler "templates/default.html"
+ >>> relativizeUrlsCompiler
+~~~~~
+
+With the conditional rendering in place, the next step is to hide
+the unpublished posts from the homepage and the list of posts.
+Both lists are generated from the results of a requireAllA call.
+The last argument of requireAllA is a Compiler, and requireAllA
+passes a pair consiting of the currently rendered page and a list
+of all the required pages. All we have to do to suppress the pages
+is to write a Compiler that takes such a pair as input, leaves the
+first element of the pair unchanged and filters out all the unpublished
+pages from list in the second element of the pair and then pass the
+output from this compiler to the existing compilers handling the
+list generation for the `index` and `posts` pages.
+
+Again, we can use a function from `Control.Arrow` to build this
+compiler from simpler ones, in this case it is `***`, which combines
+two arrows to one arrow from pairs to pairs. For our purposes, we
+combine the identity arrow, which leaves its input unchanged, and an
+ordinary `filter` on a list lifted into the compiler arrow:
+
+~~~~~{.haskell}
+filterPublished :: Compiler (Page a, [Page b]) (Page a, [Page b])
+filterPublished = id *** arr (filter isPublished)
+~~~~~
+
+All that remains to do is to chain this compiler in front of the existing
+compilers passed to requireAllA in the code for `posts.html`
+
+~~~~~{.haskell}
+ >>> requireAllA "posts/*" (filterPublished >>> addPostList)
+~~~~~
+
+and for `index.html`:
+
+~~~~~{.haskell}
+ >>> requireAllA "posts/*"
+ (filterPublished
+ >>> (id *** arr (take 3 . reverse . sortByBaseName))
+ >>> addPostList)
+~~~~~
+
+You may have noticed that the code for the index page uses the same
+`id *** something` construct to extract some elements from the list
+of all posts.
+
+## Don't generate unpublished pages at all
+
+The above code will treat unpublished posts differently and hide them
+from all lists of posts, but they will still be generated, and someone
+who knows their URLs will still be able to access them. That may be
+what you need, but sometimes you might want to suppress them
+completely. The simplest way to do so is to leave the rendering
+pipeline for `"posts/*"` unchanged and just add the `isPagePublished`
+compiler at the end. This will not compile, since hakyll knows how to
+write a `Page String`, but not how to write an `Either (Page String)
+(Page String)`. But that can be amended by a simple type class
+declaration:
+
+~~~~~{.haskell}
+instance Writable b => Writable (Either a b) where
+ write p (Right b) = write p b
+ write _ _ = return ()
+~~~~~
+
+Now hakyll will happily generate published pages and ignore
+unpublished ones. This solution is of course slightly wasteful, as at
+will apply all the templates to an unpublished page before finally
+discarding it. You can avoid this by using the `+++` function, which
+does for the sum datatype `Either` what `***` does for the product
+type pair:
+
+~~~~~{.haskell}
+ match "posts/*" $ do
+ route $ setExtension ".html"
+ compile $ pageCompiler
+ >>> isPublishedPage
+ >>> (id +++ (applyTemplateCompiler "templates/post.html"
+ >>> applyTemplateCompiler "templates/default.html"
+ >>> relativizeUrlsCompiler))
+~~~~~
+
+The other problem with this solution is more severe: hakyll will no
+longer generate the index and posts pages due to a rare problem in
+haskell land: a runtime type error. Hakyll tries to be smart and reuse
+the parsed pages from the `match "posts/*"` when processing the
+`requireAllA "posts/*"` calls by caching them. But the compilers there
+still expect a list of pages instead of a list of eithers, so we have
+to replace `filterPublised` with something that works on the
+latter. Luckily (or, probably, by design), `Data.Either` provides just
+the function we need, so the new filtering compiler is actually
+shorter that the original, even though it has a more intimidating
+type:
+
+~~~~~{.haskell}
+filterPublishedE :: Compiler (Page a, [Either (Page b) (Page b)]) (Page a, [Page b])
+filterPublishedE = id *** arr rights
+~~~~~
+
+## Timed releases
+
+Exploiting the fact that compilers are arrows, we can do more mixing
+and matching of compilers to further refine how hakyll deals with page
+attributes like `published`. Maybe you want `cron` to update your blog
+while you are on vacation, so you want posts to be considered
+published if the `published` field is either `true` or a time in the
+past.
+
+If you happen to live in the UK in winter or enjoy to do time zone
+calculation in your head, your new function to test if a page is
+published and the compiler derived from it might then look like this
+
+~~~~~{.haskell}
+isPublishedYet :: Page a -> UTCTime -> Bool
+isPublishedYet page time =
+ let published = getField "published" page in
+ published == "true" || after published
+ where
+ after published =
+ let publishAt = parseTime defaultTimeLocale "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" published in
+ fromMaybe False (fmap (\embargo -> embargo < time) publishAt)
+
+isPagePublishedYet :: Compiler (Page a, UTCTime) (Either (Page a) (Page a))
+isPagePublishedYet = arr (\(p,t) -> if isPublishedYet p t then Right p else Left p)
+~~~~~
+
+This compiler has a pair of a page and a time as its input, and we can
+use yet another function from `Control.Arrow` to construct a compiler
+that generates the input for it, the function `&&&`. It takes two
+compilers (arrows) with the same input type and constructs a compiler
+from that type to a pair of the output types of the two compilers.
+For the first argument we take the `pageCompiler` which we already
+call at the beginning of the page compilation. The second argument
+should be a compiler with the same input type as `pageCompiler` that
+returns the current time. But the current time lives in the IO monad
+and does not at all depend on the resource the current page is
+generated from, so we have to cheat a little bit by calling
+`unsafeCompiler` with a function that ignores its argument and returns
+an `IO UTCTime`, which `unsafeCompiler` will unwrap for us:
+
+~~~~~{.haskell}
+ match "posts/*" $ do
+ route $ setExtension ".html"
+ compile $ (pageCompiler &&& (unsafeCompiler (\_ -> getCurrentTime)))
+ >>> isPagePublishedYet
+ >>> (id +++ ( ... as above ...))
+~~~~~
+
+This is all we have to change if we don't generate unpublished pages
+at all. If we just hide them from the lists, the call to `|||`
+discards the information that a page is not (yet) published that was
+encoded in the `Either`. In that case we could use the `setField`
+function from `Hakyll.Web.Page.Metadata` to rewrite the `published`
+field of the left and right pages in `isPagePublished(Yet)` to
+canonical values that the original `isPublished` function called from
+`filterPublished` understands:
+
+~~~~~{.haskell}
+isPagePublishedYet = arr (\(p,t) -> if isPublishedYet p t then pub p else unpub p)
+ where
+ pub p = Right $ setField "published" "true" p
+ unpub p = Left $ setField "published" "false" p
+~~~~~
+
+The final version of this code can be found in the timedblog example,
+together with the required `import` statements. \ No newline at end of file