In addition to content, Statiq Web has rich support for data files.

Data files should be placed in the input folder (or a sub-folder) alongside content and are processed based on their media type (which is determined by file extension). The following extensions are recognized by default:

.json processes the file as JSON.
.yaml and .yml processes the file as YAML.

Regardless of format the data files are parsed and the data in them is added as metadata to the resulting documents.

Accessing Data Files

Data files are processed by the Data pipeline and can be accessed through the Outputs property of the execution context (which is also available directly in some templating languages like Razor as an Outputs property).

For example, the following code will find all documents containing data from YAML files that describe different fruits stored in a food/fruit folder under the default input folder:

IDocument[] fruits = Outputs
  .FromPipeline("Data")
  .FilterSources("food/fruit/*")
  .ToArray();

Outputting Data Files

By default data files are not output. You may want to adjust this behavior for individual data files or entire directories. This behavior can be controlled with the ShouldOutput metadata and there are a few ways to set it:

Set ShouldOutput to true directly in the data file. This will result in the ShouldOutput value being present in the output file, but that's not always a problem.
Set ShouldOutput to true for an individual file, and entire directory, or an entire directory tree in a directory metadata file.
Set ShouldOutput to true in a sidecar file.
Set ShouldOutput to true in front matter.