co-views

Template rendering for co using co-render. This module provides higher level sugar than co-render to reduce redundancy, for example specifying a views directory and default extension name.

Installation

$ npm install co-views

And install whichever engine(s) you use:

$ npm install ejs jade

Options

• map an object mapping extension names to engine names [{}]
• default default extension name to use when missing [html]
• cache cached compiled functions [NODE_ENV != 'development']

map

For example if you wanted to use "swig" for .html files you would simply pass:

{ map: { html: 'swig' } }

default

Set the default template extension when none is passed to the render function. This defaults to "html". For example if you mostly use Jade, then you'd likely want to assign this to:

{ default: 'jade' }

Allowing you to invoke render('user') instead of render('user.jade').

helpers

When using Handlebars as your rendering templates, Helper registration failed on older versions of co-views, but this fork allows you to pass these helpers into views() when exporting the render function. For example, if you wanted to add an authentication helper gate to your views:

/*
Gate Helper, to allow use of the same views
for both authenticated and non-authenticated users.

{{gate userObj}}
  <p>Logged In!</p>
{{else}}
  <p>Not Logged In!</p>
{{/gate}}
*/
var gateHelper = function(user, options) {
  if(user) {
    return options.fn(this);
  } else {
    return options.inverse(this);
  }
};

module.exports = views(__dirname + '/path/to/views', {
  map: { html: 'handlebars' },
  helpers: {
    gate: gateHelper
  }
});

cache

When true compiled template functions will be cached in-memory, this prevents subsequent disk i/o, as well as the additional compilation step that most template engines peform. By default this is enabled when the NODE_ENV environment variable is anything but "development", such as "stage" or "production".

Example

Render several users with different template engines in parallel. View lookup is performed relative to the ./examples directory passed, and the "swig" engine is mapped to ".html" files.

var co = require('co');
var views = require('co-views');

var render = views('examples', {
  map: { html: 'swig' }
});

var tobi = {
  name: 'tobi',
  species: 'ferret'
};

var loki = {
  name: 'loki',
  species: 'ferret'
};

var luna = {
  name: 'luna',
  species: 'cat'
};

co(function *(){
  var a = render('user', { user: tobi });
  var b = render('user.jade', { user: loki });
  var c = render('user.ejs', { user: luna });
  var html = yield [a, b, c];
  html = html.join('');
  console.log(html);
})();

App-wide views

Dependending on your choice of application structure, you may wish to share these same settings between all of your application, instead of constantly initializing co-views. To do this simply create a views.js module and export the render function returned:

var views = require('co-views');

module.exports = views('views', {
  map: {
    html: 'swig',
    md: 'hogan'
  }
});

License

MIT