DPL:FAQ

My article name contains underscores, but in the DPL result they won´t appear.

Normally, DPL replaces all undercores in article names by spaces when showing the result. You can replace underscores by their symbolic html name via the 'replaceintitle' statement. So DPL will no longer recognize the underscores and later the html engine will translate the symbolic name to underscores.

This wiki contains an Article_with_underscore. Normally DPL would show it as

• Article with underscore

. But with {{#dpl:titlematch=%underscore|replaceintitle=/ /,_}} you will get

• Article_with_underscore

When I use multi-column output my background color is cluttered

There is a special parameter named rowcolformat which allows to set the background color, cell-spacing etc. in combinaton with 'columns=' or 'rows='. See also DPL:Requests_for_new_features_Archive#Global background-color.

I try to generate table formatting with DPL but it looks weird - to hell with the syntax!

Indeed, complex queries can be somewhat tricky. But this is not only a problem of DPL. MediaWiki is quite sensitive to blanks and linefeeds and half of your problems will probably come from there.

There is a simple trick how you can DEBUG your DPL script:

Use a resultsheader and a resultsfooter to enclose all DPL output in pre/nowiki tags like this:

<dpl>
  resultsheader=<pre><nowiki>
  resultsfooter=</nowiki></pre>
  titlematch=Nig%
  include=%1[300]
  format={|class=wikitable\n!article\n!beginning\n|-,\n[[%PAGE%|%TITLE%\n,\n,\n|}
</dpl>

If we execute the above query (without the debug header/footer) the result will be deeply unsatisfactory:

[[Nig1|Nig1 [[Nig2|Nig2 [[Nig3|Nig3 [[Nig4|Nig4 [[Nigunda Test|Nigunda Test Nigunda Test History - Chapter Sequence in the article doesn´t matter for DPL .. [[Nigunda|Nigunda some facts about religious groups in Nigunda; some other facts about religious groups in Nigunda;[[Nigeria|Nigeria

See also: Nigerian military juntas of 1966-1979 and 1983-1998

More than 2,000 years ago. the Nok..→

article	beginning

But why?

---

With our little trick we can watch the output of DPL which would normally be immediately rendered by the wiki parser:

{{Extension DPL}}{|class=wikitable
!article
!beginning
|-
[[Nig1|Nig1]]


[[Nig2|Nig2]]


[[Nig3|Nig3]]


[[Nig4|Nig4]]


[[Nigunda Test|Nigunda Test]]

Nigunda Test History - Chapter  Sequence in the article doesn´t matter for DPL ..


[[Nigunda|Nigunda]]

some facts about religious groups in Nigunda; some other facts about religious groups in Nigunda;


[[Category:Tag_Event2]]

[[Nigeria|Nigeria]]

:<div class="noprint">''Main article: [[History of Nigeria|History of Nigeria]]''</div>
:<span class="boilerplate seealso">''See also: [[:Nigerian military juntas of 1966-1979 and 1983-1998|Nigerian military juntas of 1966-1979 and 1983-1998]]''</span>
More than 2,000 years ago. the [[Nok]]  [[Nigeria#History|..→]]

|}

---

And now we see: After the |- the next table row does not start with a '|'; and, apart from that, there is no "end of row" after each article. Now it is easy to correct the DPL query:

<dpl>
  titlematch=Nig%
  include=%1[300]
  format={|class=wikitable\n!article\n!beginning\n|-,\n|\n[[%PAGE%|%TITLE%]],\n|-,\n|}
  secseparators=\n|\n,
</dpl>

.. and we get the desired result:

article	beginning
Nig1
Nig2
Nig3
Nig4
Nigunda Test	Nigunda Test History - Chapter Sequence in the article doesn´t matter for DPL ..
Nigunda	some facts about religious groups in Nigunda; some other facts about religious groups in Nigunda;
Nigeria	See also: Nigerian military juntas of 1966-1979 and 1983-1998 More than 2,000 years ago. the Nok ..→

---

In our "debugger" it looks like this:

{{Extension DPL}}{|class=wikitable
!article
!beginning
|-
|
[[Nig1|Nig1]]
|
|-
|
[[Nig2|Nig2]]
|
|-
|
[[Nig3|Nig3]]
|
|-
|
[[Nig4|Nig4]]
|
|-
|
[[Nigunda Test|Nigunda Test]]
|
Nigunda Test History - Chapter  Sequence in the article doesn´t matter for DPL ..

|-
|
[[Nigunda|Nigunda]]
|
some facts about religious groups in Nigunda; some other facts about religious groups in Nigunda;


[[Category:Tag_Event2]]
|-
|
[[Nigeria|Nigeria]]
|
:<div class="noprint">''Main article: [[History of Nigeria|History of Nigeria]]''</div>
:<span class="boilerplate seealso">''See also: [[:Nigerian military juntas of 1966-1979 and 1983-1998|Nigerian military juntas of 1966-1979 and 1983-1998]]''</span>
More than 2,000 years ago. the [[Nok]]  [[Nigeria#History|..→]]
|-
|}

Getting pages with references to templates with particular parameters

Let's say that your company uses a wiki to assign and keep track of tasks. So, let's say that you have created a todo template which, as a parameter, takes the name, username, or some other semblance of a name of a person responsible for the task. If you now want to see the taskls which have been assigned to a given person you could use something like

<dpl>
    uses        = Template:Todo2
    include     = {Todo2}:1,{Todo2}:2
    includematch= /\|(Sam Brown)|(Brown)|(SBrown)/i
    table       = ,,Person,Task
</dpl>

which produces

Content page	Person	Task
Todotest1	Brown, Sam	To be done by Brown, Sam
Todotest2	Sam Brown	To be done by Sam Brown
Todotest3	SBrown	have to do what it says by SBrown

Inserting spaces and comma in the output

Just use the numeric html alias for comma: ,; you may want to have a space after that 'comma', so line wrapping will work normally:

{{#dpl:category=MyItems|listseparators=,[[%PAGE%|%TITLE%]], ,,}}

Why does my deleted page still appear on Special:Wantedpages?

When a page is categorized such that it appears in a DPL query and is subsequently deleted, it will immediately disappear from the DPL query results. However, depending on how long the page has been around, it will temporarily still appear on Special:Wantedpages and navigating to the page's What Links Here page will still show the DPL query page as a page that links to it.

To get it to stop that unruly behavior, do one of the following:

• Wait awhile (an hour or so). The wiki will sort this out over time in a background process.
• Execute 'php runJobs.php' in the maintenance folder of your MediaWiki installation
• Open the DPL query page in edit mode and save it again (this will add to your Recent Changes page)
• Add reset=all in a final DPL query on the query page (see here.) This has other side effects - read about it first.

Why does my deleted page still have a link to a query page in its What Links Here list?

The answer to this is already in the previous section, but we wanted you to be able to find your question anyway.

How do I 'see' the wikitext my DPL generates?

There is a simple trick to DEBUG your DPL script:

Use a resultsheader and a resultsfooter to enclose all DPL output in pre and nowiki tags like this:

<dpl>
  ...
  resultsheader=<pre><nowiki>
  resultsfooter=</nowiki></pre>
  ...
</dpl>

How do I offset an ordered list by a certain number?

Use the format statement and define an offset for the list:

<dpl>
  category=Fictitious country
  format=<ol start="4">,<li>%PAGE%</li>,\n,</ol>
</dpl>

4. DPL Example 007 main page 1
5. Nigunda
6. Nigunda Test
7. Somango

How do I create tabular output?

The answer is (surprisingly) quite simple. There are a several of different methods depending on the data you want. Example A) and B) below return page 'meta-data'. Example C) below returns data on the page itself, either from within specific page sections or from templates used on the page.

A) A table of page meta-data;

The 'parser function' syntax of the DPL ({{#dpl:...) gives the cleanest looking code, and is used below for that reason. However, the regular <DPL> syntax works in an identical way but with different layout.

{{#dpl:
  |category       = Country
  |count          = 10
  |mode           = userformat
  |addauthor      = true
  |addpagesize    = true
  |addpagecounter = true
  |addfirstcategorydate = true
  |userdateformat       = d-m-Y
  |listseparators = 
    {¦ class="sortable"
      \n! 
      \n! Date
      \n! Name
      \n! Author
      \n! Views
      \n! Size
    \n¦-,
      \n¦ align="right" ¦ %NR%
      \n¦ align="right" ¦ %DATE%
      \n¦ align="left"  ¦ [[%PAGE%]]
      \n¦ align="left"  ¦ [[User:%USER%¦%USER%]]
      \n¦ align="right" ¦ %COUNT%
      \n¦ align="right" ¦ %SIZE% B,
    \n¦-\n,
    ¦}
}}

Gives;

	Date	Name	Author	Views	Size
1	02-09-2007	Nig1	Gero	%COUNT%	166 B
2	02-09-2007	Nig2	Gero	%COUNT%	166 B
3	02-09-2007	Nig3	67.41.66.71	%COUNT%	174 B
4	03-09-2007	Nig4	67.41.66.71	%COUNT%	198 B
5	05-09-2007	Category:CountryA	67.41.66.71	%COUNT%	301 B
6	05-09-2007	Category:CountryB	67.41.66.71	%COUNT%	301 B

The key to understanding how this works is;

1. understand DPL basics (link?),
2. understand table syntax, and
3. understand the listseparators parameter.

Once you understand these things you will understand the above DPL.

B) The same table of page meta-data using the 'table' parameter;

I wish I knew how to do this...

The 'table' parameter is designed to create tabular output for elements which come from an include statement. So you would have to use a surrogate template ('phantom template') which could use the %variables%. But this works only if there exists a template which each of your article uses exactly once. So, normally you will have to use the approach shown above .

Gero 15:45, 18 September 2007 (CEST)

Can you show us how would it would look? (Assuming we had a template that was used in each page exactly once). --Dmb 21:29, 20 September 2007 (CEST)

C) A table of page section or template data;

See Test table.

Where can I talk about DPL?

Try here;

• irc://irc.freenode.net/#DPL
• On the mailing list?
• On a discussion page somewhere on this site...