Outputting Category Fields in any Location

5min
This Article shows you how you can access Categories' fields on any Liquid Page -If you're beginning to develop with Categories, start here!
Introduction
In this set of Articles, we'll show you the Liquid syntax needed to get the most out of Categories on the Front End. 
This time we'll look at the Categories Object. This makes information about your Site's Categories available via Liquid. It can be accessed in any Liquid file on Siteglide. 

We'll cover:
Outputting the Categories data Object
Accessing a specific Category via ID
After accessing the Category, outputting its fields
Looping over all Categories on the Site
Outputting the Categories data Object
The following Liquid outputs a JSON object containing the details of all Categories:{{context.exports.categories.data}} 
This object is a "key map" with every Category stored in key-value pairs where the key is the ID of the Category and the value is an object containing all other available fields.
Accessing a specific Category via ID
As the Categories data Object is a key map, you can access any specific category by accessing the object and then passing in the Category's ID in square brackets: {{context.exports.categories.data['1234']}}
Accessing a Category's Fields
Once you've accessed the value of that Category via it's ID, you can access that Category's Fields using dot notation. For example, here we'll access its name: {{context.exports.categories.data['1234']}}.name
Other available fields are:
id - the ID of the Category
name - the name of the Category
parent - the ID of the Parent Category if there is one
slug - the end of the URL for the Category Detail Page which is unique to this Item
meta_title - the meta-title of the Category
meta_desc - the meta-description of the Category
og_title - the open graph title of the Category
og_desc - the open graph description of the Category
og_type - the open graph type of the Category
twitter_type - the twitter type of the Category
full_slug - the full (relative) URL for the Category Detail Page
Looping over all Categories on the Site
If you wish to display all the Categories on the Site, you can loop over them all. Inside the For Loop you can display any HTML or Category fields you like.
HTML
{% for category in context.exports.categories.data %}
  {{category[0]}} <!-- Category ID -->
  {{category[1]}} <!-- Current Category JSON Object -->
  {{category[1].name}} <!-- Accessing current Category's field e.g. name -->
{% endfor %}
{% for category in context.exports.categories.data %}
  {{category[0]}} <!-- Category ID -->
  {{category[1]}} <!-- Current Category JSON Object -->
  {{category[1].name}} <!-- Accessing current Category's field e.g. name -->
{% endfor %}
﻿
If you want to skip any Categories, you can use Liquid if statements and the continue tag to do this:
HTML
{% for category in context.exports.categories.data %}
  {% if category[1].name == "name_of_category_I_want_to_skip" %}
    {% continue %}
  {% endif %}
  {{category[1].name}} <!-- Accessing current Category's field e.g. name -->
{% endfor %}
{% for category in context.exports.categories.data %}
  {% if category[1].name == "name_of_category_I_want_to_skip" %}
    {% continue %}
  {% endif %}
  {{category[1].name}} <!-- Accessing current Category's field e.g. name -->
{% endfor %}
﻿
Updated 06 Apr 2023
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