How to specify a sidebar in _metadata.yml?

[fredguth]

Description

I would like to create a website that works like a portal (meaning aggregating subsites).
The portal has sections like 'Datasets', 'Dashboards', .... and each section of the portal lists index.qmd files inside their directories. Neither the portal nor the listing sections have sidebars. But when I select a link in the listing, I go to a subsite, somewhere like 'Datasets/my-latest-project/index.qmd' with its own sidebar.

I think I need a sidebar instead of a TOC navigation because each subpage of the subsite has its own toc and shouldn't be seen from the subsite/index.qmd TOC.

I wanted to specify the sidebar contents locally in each subsite subdirectory. Using quarto-web as an example, each section will be a listing like the Blog section and each link will direct to a subsite that will be similar to the References section.

Reading quarto-web code, I notice the References section has its sidebar defined in the root _quarto.yml and again in a _reference.yml which I believe is used only for automatically creating links in its /docs/reference/index.qmd page.

Isn't there a way to add the sidebar information in a subdirectory _metadata.yml file? Is there an example of something like what I am looking for?

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Quarto 99.9.9
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      Version: 99.9.9
      commit: 2d068c35a2d5040a515fed1b6e991514144245f6
      Path: /Users/fredguth/Code/quarto-cli/package/dist/bin

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      TinyTeX: v2023.01
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      Using: TinyTex
      Path: /Users/fredguth/Library/TinyTeX/bin/universal-darwin
      Version: 2022

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      Path: /opt/homebrew/opt/[email protected]/bin/python3.11
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      Version: 4.3.2
      Path: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/r/4.3.2/lib/R
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        - /opt/homebrew/Cellar/r/4.3.2/lib/R/library
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[mcanouil]

You need to define all the sidebars in _quarto.yml. Add (meaningful) IDs to them.
Then add sidebar: meaningful-id in _metadata.yml for each of your sub-directories.

[fredguth]

So I need to change the root _quarto.yml everytime, right? There is no way to compose the sidebar in the same way _metadata.yml is merged, right? No, _sidebar.yml

[mcanouil]

I don't know what you mean by "everytime".
If you manually add document and title for every entry that's a choice.
In this case, I use contents: directory and use the title of each document automatically, so I never have to change the sidebar. Downside, you don't get sections.
It's possible (far from certain) that contents accepts a YAML file which you could have in your subdirectories.