# Sidebars

This part is very complicated and hard to navigate. Sidebars are loaded through the following steps:

1. **Loading**. The sidebars file is read. Returns `SidebarsConfig`.
2. **Normalization**. The shorthands are expanded. This step is very lenient about the sidebars' shapes. Returns `NormalizedSidebars`.
3. **Validation**. The normalized sidebars are validated. This step happens after normalization, because the normalized sidebars are easier to validate, and allows us to repeatedly validate & generate in the future.
4. **Generation**. This step is done through the "processor" (naming is hard). The `autogenerated` items are unwrapped. In the future, steps 3 and 4 may be repeatedly done until all autogenerated items are unwrapped. Returns `ProcessedSidebars`.
   - **Important**: this step should only care about unwrapping autogenerated items, not filtering them, writing additional metadata, applying defaults, etc.—everything will be handled in the post-processor. Important because the generator is exposed to the end-user and we want it to be easy to be reasoned about.
5. **Post-processing**. Defaults are applied (collapsed states), category links are resolved, empty categories are flattened. Returns `Sidebars`.