An elegant way to get Jekyll collection item by name?

Question

In Jekyll 2.5.3, I use albums collection (because I need not only data stored, but also pages generated).

When Jekyll Data Files are used, you can get a data for particular item as simple as: site.data.albums[foo]

But with collections, things are much worse. All those ways I've tried just do nothing:

• site.albums[foo]
• site.collections.albums[foo]
• site.collections.albums.docs[foo]
• site.collections.albums.files[foo]

So I need to:

1. Loop through all collection items
2. For each of them get a bare name
3. Compare this name with some target name
4. If the name matches, finally assign collection item data to some variable to use

Any better suggestions?

Answer 1

I have just done this today, you are correct with your assertions. Here's how I did it:

<!-- this is in a partial with a 'name' parameter -->
{% for item in site.albums %}
    {% assign name = item.path | split:"/" | last | split:"." | first %}
    {% if name == include.name %}
        {% assign collectionItem = item %}
    {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

Usage

{{ collectionItem.title }}
{{ collectionItem.url }}
{{ collectionItem.path }}

It can even be used to populate values in other partials, like so:

{% include card.html title=workItem.title bg=workItem.card.bg href=workItem.url %}

Answer 2

As of Jekyll 3.2, you can use the filter where_exp to filter a collection by any of its properties. So if I have the following item in an albums collection:

---
title: My Amazing Album
---
...

I can grab the first match for an item by that name:

{% assign album = site.albums 
    | where_exp:"album", "album.title == 'My Amazing Album'" 
    | first %}

Note that I use the first filter because where_exp returns an array of matched items.

And then use it any way I like:

<h1>{{ album.title }}</h1>

I can't vouch for the build performance of this method, but I have to imagine it's better than a Liquid loop.