One of the features of Azure DevOps is to create a wiki based on a folder inside a Git repo. Every page inside your wiki is a separate markdown file. This means that you can change the content of your wiki outside Azure DevOps and push the changes when you are ready, the same way you handle your code inside your Git repo.
If you are a developer, this is probably the way you’ll create any content, but for people who are less technical, they can directly add/delete/change pages inside the wiki. All interactions with the Git repo is handled behind the scenes making it a very user friendly experience for most people.
Today I had to make a small change inside the wiki of one of my clients. I had to move a page in the file hierarchy. As I didn’t had the repo available on my local machine, I decided to directly apply the change inside the wiki instead of creating a local git repo, pulling the source code, making my change and push it again.
So I simple dragged the page to a different location in the file hierarchy. However after doing that, I saw the following error message at the top of the wiki page:
I was able to fix it by moving the file again(another drag and drop), but what does this error mean?
First thing that is important is that when you are using a code based wiki inside Azure DevOps, there is a default file hierarchy that puts all wiki pages in alphabetical order.
Remark: There is also the concept of a provisioned wiki. Read all the details here if you want to know the difference.
An alphabetical order is typically not what we want for our wiki, so how can we change this? Good question! And the answer is through an .order file. This file can be added to any folder inside the wiki git repository and it will define the page order.
The format of the file is simple, it contains a list of all the files in a folder in the order we want to see them inside the wiki.
So to explain the error above, for an unknown reason by moving the file inside the page hierarchy the entry disappeared in the .order file.
In my case the error disappeared by executing the action again, otherwise you can manually edit the .order file and add the missing page.
That’s it!