Including .md files in the catalog structure

[HCNenseth]

With the new v5.8 is there a way to include informative texts in the folder headers?
We made a hack to include this in our v4.6 to inform users of terms of service, dataset info etc

Examples
https://thredds.met.no/thredds/catalog.html
https://thredds.met.no/thredds/catalog/greenroad/catalog.html

[lesserwhirls]

Greetings!

TDS 5 utilizes Thymeleaf as a templating system for most catalog-centric HTML views. More information can be found in the documentation. Controlling the header/footer content is fairly straight forward (as an example, the header/footer on https://thredds.ucar.edu/thredds/catalog/catalog.html is configured using this template).

Adding content to a a particular datasets catalog based on the presence of a markdown file would be a bit more work, but would make for a welcome contribution! I believe it would involve a combination of a bit of new java code to handle the markdown specific tasks and injecting that into the model (likely in CatalogViewContextParser) and a modification of the Thymeleaf templates used to take advantage of that work (probably dataset.html or datasetFragments.html here) (does that sound about right, @haileyajohnson?).

[haileyajohnson]

I don't think any html changes would be necessary, once the new fields are in the model, custom fragments (top section, bottoms section, and info tabs), would already be able to access that. But otherwise yes, if the custom fragments can't be made from the dataset properties listed here, and you wanted to use context contributed from a markdown file (or json might be easier?), all you'd really need to do would be add a function to [DatasetContext](https://github.com/Unidata/tds/blob/0a0261774a77f9da7cb2c3eca2b84ee8196f2b3f/tds/src/main/java/thredds/server/catalogservice/CatalogViewContextParser.java#L392) like getExtraContext() or something that reads in the file and adds properties to the model.

[lesserwhirls]

Thanks @haileyajohnson!