defineRenderer for marko

[jpattishall]

Description

Currently marko-widgets allows to define a UI component's renderer as require('marko-widgets').defineRenderer({...});. I would like to propose a similar, but simpler:

require('marko').defineRenderer({...});

Context

Building our project, we've defined custom taglibs that export the simplest "components" to more complex components. For simple componets (server-rendered only, no state, little to no client behavior), our approach to custom taglibs has been to export in index.js a function that takes an input and then calls template.render.

module.exports = function(input, out) {
    template.render(input, out);
}

Unlike defineRenderer, this does not export a render function similar to defineRenderer. We could set exports.render or use createRenderFunc from raptor-renderer, however I would like to propose a defineRenderer in marko, with similar (but much simpler) life cycle events.

module.exports = require('marko').defineRenderer({
    template: require('./template.marko'),
    getTemplateData: function (input) {
        input.time = Date.now();
        return input;
    }
});

The added benefit (and why this beats exports.render or createRenderFunc) is that if the simple component takes on a more, complex role, adding -widgets + any extra lifecycle event methods is straightforward and painless.

Thanks!

[yomed]

👍 I always thought this API difference between marko and marko-widgets was a bit strange.

[pcanella]

👍 totally agree here.

[patrick-steele-idem]

Actual usage will be the following:

var defineRenderer = require('marko/defineRenderer');

module.exports = defineRenderer({
    template: require('./template.marko'),
    getTemplateData: function(input) {
        var firstName = input.firstName;
        var lastName = input.lastName;

        return {
            fullName: firstName + ' ' + lastName
        };
    }
})

NOTE: defineRenderer should be required as a sub-module (require('marko/defineRenderer')). This was done to avoid adding any extra weight to the main marko runtime.