Poirot

Description

Allows you to use Mustache template partials in Rails, also ads a helper method to easily allow JavaScript to re-use the same templates.

Usage

Create a partial just like you would with erb, prefixing the name with an underscore.

app/views/posts/_post_list.html.mustache

The template will have access to all normal rails helper methods and any instance variables that were set in the controller. If you need more than this an optional view class can be included, it should have the same name as the partial, but without the underscore.

app/views/posts/post_list_view.rb

module Posts
  class PostListView < Poirot::View
    def foo
      "bar"
    end

    def post_link
      post_path(post)
    end
  end
end

The view class has access to all the normal Rails helpers and access to the controller instance variables, e.g @post becomes the method post.

Also included is a simple view helper for including mustache templates in a page ready for use by JavaScript.

<%= template_include_tag 'post_list' %>

The above will insert a script tag with the contents of the partial called post_list, the type will be set as text/mustache and the id will be post-list-template.

<script id="post-list-template" type="text/mustache">
  <!-- template will be here! -->
</script>

Javascript Helper

Poirot also adds a javascript helper for using mustache templates from the browser. In Rails 3.1 this will be automatically added to the asset pipeline, you just need to add //= require poirot in your application.js file.

If you are using rails 3 then you can run the rails g poirot:install to install the javascripts in your application.

Using the poirot javascript helper is simple, given a template added to the page using template_include_tag

<%= template_include_tag 'post_list' %>

You can render this template from javascript by doing the following

poirot.postList()

This will return the contents of the post_list template wrapped in a jQuery object, ready for inserting into the dom. If you have data to pass to the template then you can pass it as the argument to the function, e.g.

poirot.postList({foo: "bar"})

Using Handlebars.js

It is possible to use handlebars instead of mustache when rendering templates client side. To do this you need to first include the handlebars.js source. The instead of including //= require poirot in the asset pipeline you should include //= require poirot-handlebars

Using Hogan.js

It is also possible to use hogan.js instead of mustache when rendering templates client side. To do this you need to first include the hogan.js source. The instead of including //= require poirot in the asset pipeline you should include //= require poirot-hogan

Dependencies

• Rails >3.0.0
• Mustache

More

An example app using Poirot

Credits

Mark Evans & Oliver Nightingale