How to use date for field-types in nested item for custom listings

[lwjohnst86]

Description

I have a date field in a YAML file that is nested under a main heading. I want that date to be formatted via Quarto's date-format, so that it can hopefully sort the entries, or at least format them more easily. But I can't seem to use nested fields in the field-types of listings.

See this GitHub for an example of this.

I have a YAML file that looks a bit like:

- section: Test section
  entries:
    - title: Subsection
      start: "2022-12-01"
      end: "2022-12-01"

- section: Test section 231
  entries:
    - title: Subsection 3
      start: "2022-12-01"
      end: "2022-12-02"

And I have an EJS template that has something like this:

<% for (const item of items) { %>
## <%= item.section %>

<% for (const entry of item.entries) { %>
<%= entry.title %>
:  <%= entry.start %>
:  <%= entry.end %>
<% } %>
<% } %>

And my quarto doc is like this:

---
date-format: "medium"
listing:
  - id: sections
    template: sections.ejs
    contents: data.yml
    field-types:
      # entries.start: date doesn't work either
      start: date
      end: date
---

::: {#sections}
:::

And the _quarto.yml like:

project:
  type: website

website:
  title: "test"

format:
  html:
    theme: cosmo
    toc: true

It ends up formatting as-is (as 2022-12-01), not as a date via medium foramt. Is this something that isn't available yet, so I have to use some EJS function?

[mcanouil]

Could you share a small self-contained "working" (reproducible) example to work with, i.e., a complete Quarto document or a Git repository? The goal is to make it as easy as possible for us to recreate your problem so that we can fix it: please help us help you! Thanks.

---

You can share a self-contained "working" (reproducible) Quarto document using the following syntax, i.e., using more backticks than you have in your document (usually four ````).
See https://quarto.org/bug-reports.html#small-is-beautiful-aim-for-a-single-document-with-10-lines.

If you have multiple files (and if it is absolutely required to have multiple files), please share as a Git repository.

R	Python
````qmd --- title: "Reproducible Quarto Document" format: html engine: knitr --- This is a reproducible Quarto document. {{< lipsum 1 >}} ```{r} x <- c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5) y <- c(1, 4, 9, 16, 25) plot(x, y) ``` {#fig-placeholder} {{< lipsum 1 >}} The end after @fig-placeholder. ````	````qmd --- title: "Reproducible Quarto Document" format: html engine: jupyter --- This is a reproducible Quarto document. {{< lipsum 1 >}} ```{python} import matplotlib.pyplot as plt x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] y = [1, 4, 9, 16, 25] plt.plot(x, y) plt.show() ``` {#fig-placeholder} {{< lipsum 1 >}} The end after @fig-placeholder. ````

Additionally and if not already given, please share the output of quarto check within a code blocks (i.e., using three backticks ```txt), see https://quarto.org/bug-reports.html#check.

[lwjohnst86]

@mcanouil I've updated the entry, along with including a repo ☺️

[mcanouil]

From my testing and looking at the codebase, I don't think field-types supports nested field, only top-level fields.

• quarto-cli/src/project/types/website/listing/website-listing-template.ts

  Lines 90 to 93 in 7194553

  	const fieldTypes = listing[kFieldTypes];
  	for (const field of Object.keys(fieldTypes)) {
  	if (fieldTypes[field] === kFieldDate) {
  	const dateRaw = item[field];