📊 Expand indicator paths for x, size, color dimensions

[Marigold]

Closes #5665

Expand indicator paths for x, size, and color dimensions — previously only y was supported.

What changed

1. expand_config() / create_collection() now accept additional_indicators

Adds x/size/color indicators to every auto-generated view during expansion:

config = expand_config(
    tb=tb,
    indicator_names="deaths",
    additional_indicators={
        "size": "historical#population_historical",
        "color": "regions#owid_region",
    },
)

Short paths are expanded using the same logic as y indicators; paths with # or full catalog paths are kept as-is.

2. Collection.save() now auto-expands short paths added after creation

Previously, path expansion only ran once during create_collection(). If you added x/size/color indicators after that (e.g. after group_views), you had to hardcode full catalog paths. Now save() re-runs expand_paths() before validation — already-complete paths are safely skipped.

This enables the pattern from the issue:

# Before — hardcoded full paths:
view.indicators.size = Indicator(
    catalogPath="grapher/demography/2024-07-15/population/historical#population_historical"
)
view.indicators.color = Indicator(
    catalogPath="grapher/regions/2023-01-01/regions/regions#owid_region"
)

# After — short paths, auto-expanded at save():
view.indicators.set_indicator(
    size="historical#population_historical",
    color="regions#owid_region",
)

3. Updated real-world steps to use short paths

• incomes_wid.py — the exact example from the issue
• dummy.py — also used a full path for color

Testing

• 6 new tests covering full paths, table#indicator paths, short slugs, all expand_path_mode values, invalid axis validation, and combined with common_view_config
• All 137 collection tests pass (2 pre-existing integration failures unrelated to this change)

[owidbot]

Quick links (staging server):

Site Dev	Site Preview	Admin	Wizard	Docs

Login: ssh owid@staging-site-data-indicatorpaths-xsizecol

chart-diff: ✅

No charts for review.

data-diff: ✅ No differences found

Automatically updated datasets matching excess_mortality|covid|fluid|flunet|country_profile|garden/ihme_gbd/2019/gbd_risk are not included

Edited: 2026-03-31 12:51:21 UTC
Execution time: 8.12 seconds