Avoid building identical pages with Middleman proxy - ruby

Question

I am creating a static website with Middleman, referencing products parsed from a spreadsheet.
My table has these columns:
_________________________________
| Product Name | Price | Category |
| Pet Food | $12 | Pets |
| iPhone | $500 | Phone |
| Pet toy | $25 | Pets |
|______________|_______|__________|
I created pages that show all products in the Pets and Phone categories using a template called product_category.html. It creates a page for each unique category, eg. pets.html and phone.html.
The problem is that given the way I proceed, Middleman builds one category page for each product in the category, and then skips it as it is identical:
remote: create build/pets.html
remote: identical build/pets.html
remote: create build/iphone.html
Here is my sample for config.rb:
rows_by_categories = app.data.spreadsheet.sheet1.group_by { |row| row.category }
#Category Landings
app.data.spreadsheet.sheet1.each do |f|
proxy "/#{f.category.to_s.downcase.strip.gsub(' ', '-').gsub(/[^\w-]/, '')}.html", "/product_category.html", locals: {
f: {
categorytitle: f.category,
name: f.name,
all_in_category: rows_by_categories[f.category],
price: f.selling_price,
},
categories: rows_by_categories.keys,
}, ignore: true
end
I understand the loop iterates on each line of my spreadsheet and recreates a page for the corresponding category. Yet the few tries I gave, eg. modifying app.data.spreadsheet.sheet1.each do |f| into rows_by_categories.each do |f| are unsuccessful. Any clue?

Answer 1

As mentioned I have no experience with middleman but I am going to try and help anyway.
It appears that your main issue is that you are looping the individual items rather than the groups. Please try the below instead.
rows_by_categories = app.data.spreadsheet.sheet1.group_by { |row| row.category }
#Category Landings
rows_by_categories.each do |category, rows|
path_name = "/#{category.to_s.downcase.strip.gsub(' ', '-').gsub(/[^\w-]/, '')}.html"
row_data = rows.map do |row|
{
categorytitle: row.category,
name: row.name,
price: row.selling_price,
}
end
proxy path_name, "/product_category.html", locals: {
products: row_data,
categories: rows_by_categories.keys
}, ignore: true
end
Here we loop through the categories and products will now be an Array of all the products in that category rather than a single product. This will, in my limited knowledge, create a single page for each category and give you a collection products that you can loop through