Asset Ordering

[RobertLowe]

@timhaines @n1mmy

This is an edge case, but since the APIs are under going changes I thought I should call attention to it.

The bundle API doesn't allow a plugin developer to control the order of asset compilation, or at least, priority.

This is important because, with a template plugin (jade-handlebars) code you need to load the templates before user code (coffeescript).

Without the ability to direct the underlying system, the coffeescript is loaded first, before the template is defined via js.

Uncaught ReferenceError: Template is not defined

I was able to work around this by using the alphabetical ordering of files/directories.

Any thoughts on how I could fix this, or related information?

[timhaines]

@RobertLowe Hey Robert, sorry, it's not an error I'm familiar with. Someone on the Meteor Team will have a better idea.

[glasser]

Yeah, this only works with Handlebars because of this "huge hack" https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/tools/files.js#L42 which forces html files to come first in a file list. This doesn't work when you have a non-".html" template language. We need to figure this out eventually. For now, yeah, you can use alphabetical ordering (or put your template files in a subdirectory named, confusingly, lib).

[RobertLowe]

@glasser Thanks, for pointing me to that. I'd love to see a template engine adapter.

[dweldon]

This is obviously an issue for mquandalle's jade package as well.

[RobertLowe]

@dweldon indeed it's an issue for jade or other template engines, there is a workaround

This is also an area where Meteor might be rather opinionated. I feel like manifest or a dependancy chain should be the solution, but those might go against the grain of the simplicity the current rules offer.

[n1mmy]

@glasser just converted the "huge hack" to a "moderately sized hack" and added an option to mark files as templates. See f36abc9.

[Slava]

Also see meteor-jade's commit: mquandalle/meteor-jade@91b6464