Template:Namespace detect showall/doc

This is the meta-template.

It helps other templates detect what type of page they are on. It is an extended version of.

This template detects and groups all the different used on WikiIndex into several types:
 * main = Main/article space, as in normal WikiIndex articles;
 * talk = any talk space, such as page names that start with 'Talk:', 'User talk:', 'File talk:' and so on;
 * User, WikiIndex, File, MediaWiki, Template, Help, Category, Portal and Book = the other namespaces except the talk pages;
 * other = any namespaces that were not specified as a parameter to the template; see explanation below.


 * ''Note
 * In many cases, one of the simpler namespace-detection templates is likely to suffice (and will be less prone to errors made in its use). For links to these alternatives, see the navigation template at the end of this documentation.

Usage
This template takes one or more parameters named after the different page types as listed above. Like this:

If the template is on a main (article) page, it will return this:

If the template is on any other page than an article or a talk page, it will return this:

Since we feed the data to the numbered parameters, we can reuse the same data on several types of pages. Like this:

By using an empty parameter, you can make it so the template doesn't render anything for some specific page type, instead of returning what was fed to the other parameter. (Notice that the main parameter doesn't get any data in the example below.) Like this:

The code above will render nothing when on mainspace (article) pages.



The same goes for the other type, if it is omitted or fed no data, then the template will not return any data for the page types that were not explicitly specified. Like this:



Showall
This template also understands a special value called showall. Like this:

If the template is on a main (article) page, it will as usual return this:

If the template is on any other page than an article or a talk page, it will show all the data that was fed to the numbered parameters, like this:

The purpose of the showall parameter is to automatically demonstrate all variations of a message when it is shown on other pages than the pages it normally is used on.

Demospace and page
For testing and demonstration purposes, this template can take two parameters named demospace and page.

Demospace understands any of the page type names used by this template, including the other type. It tells the template to behave like it is on some specific type of page. Like this:

No matter on what kind of page the code above is used, it will return this:

The demospace parameter also understands the showall value. Like this:

Then no matter on what kind of page the code above is used, it will show all the data that was fed to the numbered parameters, like this:

The page parameter instead takes a normal pagename. It makes this template behave exactly as if on that page. The pagename doesn't have to be an existing page. Like this:

No matter on what kind of page the code above is used, it will return this:

It can be convenient to let your template understand the demospace and/or page parameter, and send it on to the template. Then do like this:

If both the demospace and page parameters are empty or undefined, then the template will detect page types as usual.

Parameters
List of all parameters:

Note: Empty values to the 'main' ... 'book' parameters do have special meaning.

Technical details
In MediaWiki, namespace 'Image' was renamed to 'File' on 11 December 2008. This template has been updated to understand both names, thus it still works fine. For backwards compatibility, it still understands 'image' both as a parameter name, such as 'image = 1', and as a value 'demospace = image'. But using 'image' is now deprecated.

Namespace 'Book' was added to the English Wikipedia on 28 December 2009. This template has been updated so it detects the 'Book:' namespace as type book, and it already automatically detected 'Book talk:' as type talk.

If you intend to feed tables as content to the numbered parameters of this template, then you need to know this:

do have a problem to handle parameter data that contains pipes ' ', unless the pipe is inside another template, or inside a piped link. Thus templates can not handle as input, unless you escape them by using the  template. This makes it hard to use wikitables as parameters to templates. Instead, the usual solution is to use '' for the table code, which is more robust.

For more technical details such as about 'copying to other projects' and 'CSS based namespace detection', see and its talk page.