Validation of _yml files

[thisisnic]

Description

I spent the best part of the past 6 months thinking I'd written a book that literally nobody read because it was unclear where to put the Google Analytics Tag in the .yml files when using multiple profiles and the traffic I saw in Google Analytics was just from an earlier version of the book where I had a different config that did work 😭

I've run into similar issues before when using a separate profile for publishing to PDF versus the website - it would be amazing if there was some sort of validation of the .yml files so that any options which had been specified but weren't used were flagged and then it would be apparent they were in the wrong place.

[mcanouil]

Could you give a concrete example of what happened exactly?

[thisisnic]

Yeah, absolutely. The PR here shows the change I needed to make to fix it: arrowrbook/book@5ec4372

Now I see it, it makes sense that that property doesn't go there, but easy to miss.

[mcanouil]

To be clear, Quarto cannot check what is "used", it can eventually in the future check for the location of misplaced options, but because formats can use any possible key in the partials/templates, to ensure it's not used would be very hard as it would require Quarto to do static analysis of all files in a project.

Note that there is YAML validation:

Now take the following:

---
title: "Reproducible Quarto Document"
format:
  html:
    google-analytics: whatever
    template-partials:
      - title-block.html
---

{{< lipsum 1 >}}

the partial being:

<header id="title-block-header">
$if(title)$<h1 class="title">$title$</h1>$endif$
$if(google-analytics)$
<p class="subtitle">$google-analytics$</p>
$endif$
</header>

In this context google-analytics is valid.

[thisisnic]

Thanks for your reply, and useful to know it's not particularly feasible as static analysis. Looks like what I'm looking for available in some IDE so that's good to know!

Looks like a great opportunity for a useful writeup to help improve user experience so will keep that in mind if I find the time.

[mcanouil]

RStudio, Visual Studio Code, and Positron should provide you with auto-completion and YAML validation.

[thisisnic]

That's great - thanks! Using RStudio and it didn't show up there, but will have a look to see if there's some update, or feature I didn't enable, or add-in I've missed.

[mcanouil]

I'm not 100% certain for RStudio, but I'm highly confident it does use Quarto YAML schema as it embeds Quarto CLI.