How to support shared sidebars

[glitch-txs]

Hi! I have the following setup

export default {
  tutorialSidebar:['doc1', 'doc2', 'commonDoc'],
  apiSidebar: ['doc3', 'doc4', 'commonDoc'],
};

My current problem is that when I'm in the tutorial page (using tutorialSidebar) and I press commonDoc it will change the first to pages from doc1 and doc2 to doc3 and doc4, meaning that the sidebar displayed is the apiSidebar now.

How can I keep the sidebar static when going to the commonDoc page? either if I'm in the tutorial or api section I want the first two pages to not change when I select commonDoc.

[slorber]

It's not ideal to have a common doc bound to 2 distinct sidebars. We have to pick one to display when you browse that doc and it might not be the one you want.

You can use a sidebar item of type "ref" so that it appears in a sidebar but that sidebar is not displayed when you browse the doc.

https://docusaurus.io/docs/next/sidebar/multiple-sidebars#sidebar-item-ref

You can also use displayed_sidebar: tutorialSidebar front matter on the common doc

[glitch-txs]

the notion of "current one" does not exist.

So there's no way to keep track of that with internal state?

[slorber]

Keep track of "what"?

When you browse /docs/commonDoc we have to display something. There's no state, it's a fresh browser load, it has to be predictable.

[glitch-txs]

you can use the path or url queries. I'm using a path to keep track of this

[slorber]

A static document has a single url/pathname for which we have to display a given sidebar

To avoid bad loading ux, the sidebar has to be in the static file, and cdns do not usually support serving different static files for query string parameters. If you want to display different sidebars depending on search parameters, then it's a dynamic feature that we don't provide and that you'll have to implement yourself. The ux would not be ideal IMHO.

---

In general please be concrete. Tell me which url exactly should show which sidebar on a given repro. A code example is more relevant than trying to describe things as text.

[glitch-txs]

I have already solved it now copy/pasting the same files multiple times. You can play with it here. The Cloud section is the static one, and the framework changes are reflected in the url path.

I guess it's way too complex to implement to offer a customizable solution. Thanks for the answer 👍

[webprofusion-chrisc]

For anyone looking for the same sort of thing one trick is to add an additional sidebar config which appears last in the last of sidebar configs, with a title such as "Common" (or anything to indicate that it's shared). Then this title will be shown for any shared documents, rather than showing the wrong product category etc. Example: https://docs.certifytheweb.com/

I guess the alternative would have been to generated new routes per sidebar and duplicate each common document under each one, as duplicating an entire document is obviously not the right approach from a maintenance perspective.

[slorber]

Why not use refs as I suggest instead?

Instead of duplicating content, you can also duplicate the docs files but import a shared _partial.mdx file in each of those: you would only need to maintain the content once. The difference with refs is that each "clone" will have a distinct URL and will display a distinct sidebar, despite presenting the same content.