toc shortcode triggering circular references

[jamesbraza]

I have the following content:

1. _index.md refers to:
   • page1.md via {{< ref "page1.md" >}}
   • page1.md.part via {{< include file="/abs/path/page1.md.part" >}}
   • page2.md via {{< ref "page2.md" >}}
   • page2.md.part via {{< include file="/abs/path/page2.md.part" >}}
2. page1.md refers to:
   • page1.md.part via {{< include file="/abs/path/page1.md.part" >}}
3. page2.md refers to:
   • page2.md.part via {{< include file="/abs/path/page2.md.part" >}}
4. page1.md.part refers to nothing
5. page2.md.part refers to:
   • page1.md via {{< ref "page1.md" >}}

This all works fine, until I add a table of contents via a toc shortcode into _index.md. The 5th item above triggers a circular reference error. This discourse post seems relevant.

Any ideas on how to avoid this circular reference?

I also don't quite understand the circular reference, as there's no reference back to _index.md in any of the subpages.

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For a full repro, please check here: jamesbraza/pycon-redux.com@7ca5eda

[xoxys]

As said in the other discussion, the ToC is a Hugo function and not theme specific. The short code just embeds {{ .Page.TableOfContents }} so this is more a question for the Hugo forum.

[xoxys]

It boils down to content/en/2022/performance-antipatterns.md.part and the usage of {{< ref ... >}} statements in this file. In general, you create a lot of nested includes and side loads, which makes the entire content structure quite complicated and hard to debug.

The Table of Content is intended to create a navigation for headers in the current page, but you have somewhat created a navigation which jumps to another page, IMO this is causing the loop while rendering the ToC.

Don't want to say you can't do it that way, but I can't help much in that case.

[jamesbraza]

Thank you for taking a look, I really appreciate it!

It has been interesting, I am going a little wild with the include of many .md.parts 🤓 . I'm not sure what you mean by a side load.

I am glad newer Hugo versions fixed this, as I think the scenario is a somewhat "downward pointing" dependency tree, not many arrows pointing back "up".

[jamesbraza]

Interestingly enough in my playing around, I was testing with Hugo 0.114.0 (current latest release), and it works fine, no circular import issue.

I traced it to between 0.110.0 (circular reference happens) --> 0.111.0 (circular reference doesn't happen). Reading 0.111.0's release notes, it mentions "table of contents" several times, so I guess some new feature resolves this issue.