Template:Infobox/doc

This template is intended as a meta-template: a template used for constructing other templates. Note: In general, it is not meant for use directly in an article, but can be used on a one-off basis if required. Help:Infobox contains an introduction about the recommended content and design of infoboxes. See WP:List of infoboxes and Category:Infobox templates for lists of prepared topic-specific infoboxes.

Usage
Usage is similar to navbox, but with an additional distinction. Each row on the table can contain either a header, or a label/data pair, or just a data cell. These are mutually exclusive states so if you define a row with both a header and a label/data pair, the label/data pair is ignored.

To insert an image somewhere other than at the top of the infobox, or to insert freeform data, use a row with only a data field.

Optional control parameters

 * name : If this parameter is present, "view/discuss/edit" links will be added to the bottom of the infobox, pointing to the named page. You may use the value ; however this is rarely what you want, because it will send users clicking these links in an infobox in an article to the template code rather than the data in the infobox that they probably want to change.
 * child : See the Embedding section for details. If this is set to "yes", this child infobox should be titled but have no name parameter. This parameter is empty by default, set it to "yes" to activate it.
 * subbox : See the Subboxes section for details. If this is set to "yes", this subbox should be titled but have no name parameter. This parameter is empty by default, set to "yes" to activate it. It has no effect if the child parameter is also set to "yes".
 * decat : If this is set to "yes", the current page will not be autocategorized in a maintenance category when the generated infobox has some problems or no visible data section. Leave empty by default or set to "yes" to activate it.

Title
There are two different ways to put a title on an infobox. One contains the title inside the infobox's border in the uppermost cell of the table, the other puts as a caption it on top of the table. You can use both of them together if you like, or just one or the other, or even neither (though this is not recommended):


 * title : Text to put in the caption over the top of the table (or as section header before the whole content of this table, if this is a child infobox). For accessibility reasons, this is the most recommended alternative.
 * above : Text to put within the uppermost cell of the table.
 * subheader(n) : additional title fields which fit below and, but before images. Subheader parameters should not be numbered more than 10 apart.

Examples:





Illustration images

 * image(n) : images to display at the top of the template. Use full image syntax, for example example.png . Image is centered by default. See WP:ALT for more on alt text. Image parameters should not be numbered more than 10 apart.
 * caption(n) : Text to put underneath the images.

Main data

 * header(n) : Text to use as a header in row n. Header and data parameters should not be numbered more than 50 apart.
 * label(n) : Text to use as a label in row n.
 * data(n) : Text to display as data in row n. Header and data parameters should not be numbered more than 50 apart.

Note: for any given value for (n), not all combinations of parameters are permitted. The presence of a header(n) will cause the corresponding data(n) (and rowclass(n) label(n), see below) to be ignored; the absence of a data(n) will cause the corresponding label(n) to be ignored. Valid combinations for any single row are:


 * class(n) header(n)
 * rowclass(n) class(n) data(n)
 * rowclass(n) label(n) class(n) data(n)

See the rendering of header4, label4, and data4 in the Examples section below.

Number ranges
To allow flexibility when the layout of an infobox is changed, it may be helpful when developing an infobox to use non-contiguous numbers for header and label/data rows. Parameters for new rows can then be inserted in future without having to renumber existing parameters. For example:

 | header3 = Section 1 | label5  = Label A |   data5  = Data A |  label7  = Label C |   data7  = Data C | header10 = Section 2 | label12 = Label D |   data12 = Data D

It is also possible to automatically renumber parameter names by using Module:IncrementParams.

Note that although there is no limitation on the number of rows available, row parameters should not be numbered more than 50 apart. See the section below for more details.

Making data fields optional
A row with a label but no data is not displayed. This allows for the easy creation of optional infobox content rows. To make a row optional use a parameter that defaults to an empty string, like so:

 | label5 = Population |  data5 =

This way if an article doesn't define the population parameter in its infobox the row won't be displayed.

For more complex fields with pre-formatted contents that would still be present even if the parameter wasn't set, you can wrap it all in an "#if" statement to make the whole thing vanish when the parameter is not used. For instance, the "#if" statement in the following example reads "#if:the parameter mass has been supplied |then display it, followed by 'kg'":

 | label6 = Mass |  data6 =

For more on #if, see here.

Hiding headers when all data fields are hidden
You can also make headers optional in a similar way. Consider this example:



If you want the first header to appear only if one or more of the data fields that fall under it are filled, one could use the following pattern as an example of how to do it:



header1 will be shown if any of item1, item2, or item3 is defined. If none of the three parameters are defined the header won't be shown and no emty row appears before the next static content. The trick to this is that the "#if" returns false only if there is nothing whatsoever in the conditional section, so only if all three of item1, item2 and item3 are undefined will the if statement fail.

Note that such trick may be sometimes very complex to test if there are many data items whose value depends on complex tests (or when a data row is generated by a recursive invokation of this template as a subbox). Ideally, the Lua module supporting this template should now support a new way to make each header row autohideable by detecting if there is at least one non-empty data row after that header row (a parameter like "autohide header1 = yes", for example, would remove the need to perform the "#if" test so that we can just to define "header1 = Optional header"),

Footer

 * below : Text to put in the bottom cell. The bottom cell is intended for footnotes, see-also, and other such information.

Italic titles
Titles of articles with infoboxes may be made italic, in line with WP:ITALICTITLE, by passing the  parameter.


 * Turn on italic titles by passing italic title from the infobox.
 * Turn off by default (notably because only Latin script may be safely rendered in this style and italic may be needed to distinguish foreign language from local English language only in that script, but would be difficult to read for other scripts) but allow some instances to be made italic by passing italic title
 * Do not make any titles italic by not passing the parameter at all.

CSS styling

 * bodystyle : Applies to the infobox table as a whole
 * titlestyle : Applies only to the title caption. Adding a background color is usually inadvisable since the text is rendered "outside" the infobox.
 * abovestyle : Applies only to the "above" cell at the top. The default style has font-size:125%; since this cell is usually used for a title, if you want to use the above cell for regular-sized text include "font-size:100%;" in the abovestyle.
 * imagestyle : Applies to the cell the image is in. This includes the text of the image caption, but you should set text properties with captionstyle instead of imagestyle in case the caption is moved out of this cell in the future.
 * captionstyle : Applies to the text of the image caption.
 * rowstyle(n) : This parameter is inserted into the.



Note, in the examples above, the child infobox is placed in a  field, not a   field. Notice that the section subheadings are not in bold font if bolding is not explicitly specified. To obtain bold section headings, place the child infobox in a header field (but not in a label field because it would not be displayed!), either using



or,



Note that omitting the title parameter, and not including any text preceding the embedded infobox, may result in spurious blank table rows, creating gaps in the visual presentation.

Subboxes
An alternative method for embedding is to use yes, which removes the outer border from the infobox, but preserves the interior structure. One feature of this approach is that the parent and child boxes need not have the same structure, and the label and data fields are not aligned between the parent and child boxes because they are not in the same parent table.



Similar embedding techniques may be used within content parameters of some other templates generating tables (such as Sidebar) :



Note that the default padding of the parent data cell containing each subbox is still visible, so the subboxes are slightly narrower than the parent box and there's a higher vertical spacing between standard cells of the parent box than between cells of distinct subboxes.

Full blank syntax
(Note: there is no limit to the number of possible rows; only 20 are given below since infoboxes larger than that will be relatively rare. Just extend the numbering as needed. The microformat "class" parameters are also omitted as they are not commonly used.)



Limitations
Previously, the number of rows available to this template was limited to 99. This restriction has been lifted now that the template has been ported to a Lua module, but to maintain backwards compatibility there is now a limit on the number of rows apart by which parameters will be detected. If parameters are numbered more than 50 apart, the later parameters may be ignored (depending on the exact numbers involved), and if parameters are numbered more than 100 apart, the later parameters will definitely be ignored.

For example, this code will display properly:

But in this code, only Section 1, Label A and Data A will be displayed, because Data B is numbered too far away from Data A (and then all the rest is ignored):

Note that parameter values may be blank - parameters are counted unless they are completely absent, in header and data(n), from the template invocation:

If only label(n) is specified (even with a non-empty value) but neither header(n) nor data(n), the parameter is ignored and considered as if it was missing:

There are also similar limitations for image(n) and subheader(n) parameters: in those cases, parameters should not be numbered more than 10 apart.

Porting to other MediaWikis
The infobox template requires the Scribunto extension and HTMLTidy to be installed. It may not work with other MediaWikis. WikiProject Transwiki has a version of this template that has been modified to work on other MediaWikis.