Images in topic excerpts

[chandan.gupta]

I am trying to set up Discourse as a headless API server. I need to show the full text of the topic and the images in my custom-built landing page. I am able to get the full text with always_include_topic_excerpts setting. However, the excerpt doesn’t have images.

Digging a bit deeper, found out that the ExcerptParser.rb has options that can help me meet my requirements. If I can change this line in Post.rb, it will meet my needs: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/1059557ce11c474fdf568571423a88821b072141/app/models/post.rb#L485

What would be the best way of going about it? Maybe create a SiteSetting for this, similar to SiteSetting.post_excerpt_maxlength?

Ideally, I would want these three boolean settings:
post_excerpt_markdown_images
post_excerpt_strip_images
post_excerpt_strip_links

Thank you for your help!

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

Is there a reason you’re trying to pull the full topic text via the excerpt? You should be able to get the full cooked content, which includes images:

[chandan.gupta]

Hi Kris, thanks for responding. I need the full topic text when I hit /latest.json. By default, it only returns the topic title with the exception of some posts (announcements?) where it also returns an excerpt. With the always_include_topic_excerts setting on, I am able to get the full text except links and images. I am looking for a way to get links and images in the excerpt.

[chandan.gupta]

Created a draft PR to get an early feedback: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/9799/files

[Bcat]

I don’t really understand but would like to discuss, either remove all links and images or add them?

[chandan.gupta]

Hi @Bcat, let me try to get a before and after screenshot shortly.

[Johani (Joe)]

Thanks for the draft PR @chandan.gupta but we strip images from excerpts for a reason

Markdown appears in topic lists for pinned topics with image at top

See screenshot - when I pin a topic to the top of topic lists that has an image at the top, it features the markdown for the image. Not sure what the intended behavior is here but I have been having trouble educating my colleagues to avoid putting images at the top for announcements to prevent it and am honestly not sure it’s the right behavior. Seems to me it should either display a thumbnail of the image or suppress it. Thoughts? Suggestions? [49%20AM]

and we also don’t like to add extra site settings unless there’s a lot of demand for them. If you really need this on your site, then I suggest creating a plugin for it.

[chandan.gupta]

Thanks @Johani, not a problem. That makes sense. So this is doable via plugins as well, correct?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

You could do it from a plugin, but this is a messy change, you are fighting with core defaults so it will have unintended results.

[chandan.gupta]

@sam would it be a complex plugin to return the posts[0].raw or posts[0].cooked along with /latest.json? This way, we wouldn’t need to piggyback on “excerpt”, and it would also satisfy our needs. Could you point me to any reference to implement this? I understand that this would involve a lot more database reads, but I am ok with this performance cost.