#### This Page

# Data Bags

The Data Bags are a quick way to store structured information that templates can access. It's just a convenient way to access data from INI or JSON files. This is useful for instance to build a navigation menu or similar things.

## Creating Bags

To create a data bag just place a `.ini` or `.json` file in the `databags/` folder. The files there are accessible by their name sans the file extension. All ordering in the source files is retained. So for instance this could be the `main-nav.ini` data file for a basic navigation:

    /downloads = Download
    /docs = Documentation
    /blog = Blog

And the template could access it like this:

    <ul class="nav">
    {% for path, label in bag('main-nav').items() %}
      <li{% if this.is_child_of(path) %} class="active"{% endif
        %}><a href="{{ path|url }}">{{ label }}</a>
      </li>
    {% endfor %}
    </ul>

## Nested Access

Data bags can be structured in more complex ways. For INI files sections can be used, for JSON files entire object trees can be stored. The bag function can thus accept arbitrary dotted path (or multiple args to `bag`) to navigate to specific items within the bag. For instance you could use this to look up values that might change depending on the alternative of a page for instance.

In this case the system is used to translate buttons. Take `buttons.ini` as an example:

    [en]
    download = Download

    [de]
    download = Herunterladen

    [ru]
    download = Скачать

And in a template it could be used like this:

    <h2>{{ bag('buttons', this.alt, 'download') }}</h2>

## Comments