Emitting lists in AsciidoctorJ extension

Hi everyone,

I have been struggling with the following issue, trying to create an extension (with AsciidoctorJ 1.5.4*) that would emit the equivalent of the following raw asciidoc content:

```
a first paragraph

listItem1:: some description
listItem2:: other text
```

I ran into a couple of issues:

- is this even possible?
- I'm trying to use a BlockMacroProcessor. Is this the correct way of doing so?
- Retrieving the attributes passed to my macro proved to be difficult, as if I only got the "main" text attribute:
```
mymacro::foobar[attr1=wizz, attr2=bar]
```
yields text => "attr1=wizz, attr2=bar" as the sole attribute.
I had to resort to this to achieve what I wanted:
```
[attr1=wizz, attr2=bar]
mymacro::foobar[]
```
Is this normal, doc?
- I am a bit confused about the "context" and "content_model" values that I can/should use. How can one actually create a ":compound" result? Should I just create a parent (my result) block and simply use that parent as the parent of children blocks?

All in all, seems like *Block* Macro Processor is not suited for what I want to do, but what should I use then?

* I saw 1.6.0 alpha1 had promissing annotation support, together with better documentation for content_model, etc. Sadly, trying to use it (together with the current maven plugin) resulted in JRuby errors. Is there any combination that is known to work?

A lot of questions I know, I hope they make sense :)

Hi Eric,

I fear that this is not possible yet with 1.5.x.

AsciidoctorJ 1.6.0 would allow to generate Asciidoc content and parse it in a Processor:
 

Processor.parseContent(parent, 
    "listitem1:: some description\n" +
    "listitem2:: Another");

I think a BlockMacroProcessor should be exactly what you need.
Have you already seen this? https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctorj/blob/asciidoctorj-1.6.0/docs/integrator-guide.adoc#block-macro-processors
It should explain a bit better how to write a BlockMacroProcessor.

Regarding the parent: You would pass the parent passed to your `process()` method also to the `parseContent()` method.
It will then append the parsed content to this node.

You're right with the Maven plugin. We changed the API in such a manner that the Maven plugin does not work with 1.6.0 atm.

Cheers
Robert

Thanks Robert,

so I was on the right track but can't do it yet :(
Any idea when a 1.6.x compatible maven plugin will be out the door?

Also, my "setting the parent" question was more related to creating ":compound" content (my initial request was to issue a paragraph followed by a list, even though I understand that with the parsing API you describe being available, I wouldn't need that). But if you have an example available (even in ruby I guess), that could be interesting.

Wait & see then!

Thank you for this message, I think I can also use it for my "reference-toc" macro.

I must tell that I am still in the process of discovering what the Asciidoctor world is offering. As described in the "Using a pre-release version" section there is a maven repo containing the pre-releases… (reading the docs is always good).

Here my pom to test it (without the asciidoctor-maven-plugin):

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>asciidoctorj.sandbox</groupId>
  <artifactId>asciidoctorj-sandbox</artifactId>
  <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>

  <repositories>
    <repository>
      <id>asciidoctor.maven</id>
      <name>asciidoctor bintray repo</name>
      <url>http://dl.bintray.com/asciidoctor/maven</url>
      <snapshots>
        <enabled>false</enabled>
      </snapshots>
    </repository>
  </repositories>

  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.asciidoctor</groupId>
      <artifactId>asciidoctorj</artifactId>
      <version>1.6.0-alpha.1</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</project>

If I understood you guys correctly, we now need a version of the asciidoctor-maven-plugin (maybe also a pre-release) that is compatible with the 1.6.x version of AsciidoctorJ.