ckanext-markdown_view

a CKAN extension creating previews for markdown files

Requirements

Purpose

Notes:

Compatibility with core CKAN versions:

CKAN version	Compatible?
2.9 and arlier	not tested
2.10	yes
2.11	yes

• "yes"
• "not tested" - I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't work
• "not yet" - there is an intention to get it working
• "no"

Installation

To install the extension:

1. Activate your CKAN virtual environment, for example:

. /usr/lib/ckan/default/bin/activate

2. Use pip to install package

pip install ckanext-markdown_view

3. Add markdown_view to the ckan.plugins setting in your CKAN    config file (by default the config file is located at    /etc/ckan/default/ckan.ini).

4. Restart CKAN. For example, if you've deployed CKAN with Apache on Ubuntu:

sudo service apache2 reload

Config settings

You can set the default formats to preselected for upload by setting the formats,

CKANINI__CKANEXT__MARKDOWN__FORMATS = 'text/markdown'

else it will react to the listed formats by default

Features

List-Aware Markdown Rendering

This extension overrides CKAN's core render_markdown helper to automatically handle list/tuple data structures. This is particularly useful when using ckanext-scheming with the multiple_text preset, which stores field values as lists.

Problem Solved: When scheming fields use both preset: multiple_text and display_snippet: markdown.html, the core CKAN helper would crash with AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'strip'.

Solution: The custom render_markdown helper automatically converts lists to newline-separated strings before rendering as markdown, providing seamless compatibility with scheming's multiple_text fields.

Example field that now works correctly:

- field_name: rights
  label: Rights
  form_snippet: markdown.html
  display_snippet: markdown.html
  preset: multiple_text
  validators: ignore_missing scheming_multiple_text

Highlight View

Each resource can be rendered by highlighting some markdown passage. The markdown content to highlight must be passed as post to the /highlight url, for example:

curl -X POST 'https://<ckan_url>/dataset/<dataset_d>/resource/<res_id>/highlight' -F highlight="<markdown code to highlight>"