Is there anyway to precompile handlebars helpers as well?

[avidal]

Any chance for a helpers filepath, which will be mixed in when precompiling?

[tkellen]

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking, but you can control the filepath of your precompiled templates by using the option processName:
https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-handlebars#processname-function

[avidal]

What I mean is if I have a helpers.js file that contains a bunch of calls to Handlebars.registerHelper, I'd be a bonus if the precompilation stage could effectively just concat that right into the precompiled templates.

Admittedly, it's not a big deal and I could do it by using a concat task that concatenates my helpers and the precompiled template file myself; so feel free to close the issue if you'd like.

[tkellen]

Ahh, ok. Yes, that's definitely something that should be handled with the concat task

[c4urself]

@avidal I'm running into this issue -- would you mind sharing exactly how you went about adding helpers to your precompiled templates.js?

[avidal]

@c4urself I didn't add it to the precompiled templates.js, I just created a new helpers.js which I load after I load the runtime and before I load the templates:

// helpers.js
(function(Handlebars) {

  Handlebars.registerHelper('foo', function() {});

}(window.Handlebars));

[c4urself]

@avidal Thanks for the reply! I had gotten it working as well -- I was using an older Handlebars version which was causing some errors.

[empz]

@avidal I'm not being able to use custom helpers in my precompiled templates. I'm doing as you suggest, first runtime, then helpers, then compiled templates.
I got an error when trying to use the template with a context.
See this for more info: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22700297/precompiling-handlebars-template-with-custom-helpers

[andycbriggs]

I recently wanted to do this and modified grunt-contrib-handlebars to pre-compile helpers into the same file (commit: andycbriggs@6494373).

You pass the helpers to the options hash, here I keep mine in an external file as a node module.

options: {
  helpers: require('./lib/templateHelpers.js')
}

That commit is a quick try and by no means tested for all cases, but would this be something that people would be interested in?