node-views

Views registry and rendering for node.js.

Features

• Register one or more views namespaces (relative path -> absolute path)
• Render templates with or without layouts
• Use any templating engine that consolidate.js supports
• Supports 'helpers' (static or dynamically generated data exposed to templates)
• Provides an easy-to-use middleware compatible with connect or middler.

Changes for 1.x

For views 1.x I did some cleanup and optimization. This involved changes that could have an impact on your implementation of views.

• Removed built-in support for flatiron.
• Stopped using proto-list-deep internally, instead opting for tea-merge.
  • Note: tea-merge is pretty strict about what it will merge together. If you were previously adding complex objects into your conf or helpers you may see merge errors. The only way to resolve this is to make sure your conf and helpers are JavaScript primitives and avoid clashes between object types at the same key.
• Updated dependency versions. For Handlebars users this should speed up rendering significantly if you turn caching on, as consolidate now appears to use it properly.

Examples

See ./examples.

Usage

Use with middler

var middler = require('middler'),
    views = require('views'),
    server = require('http').createServer(),
    registry = views.createRegistry(__dirname + '/views'); // <-- Your views directory
 
middler(server)
  .add(views.middleware(registry))
  .add(function(req, res, next) {
    // The middleware exposes res.render() and res.renderStatus()
    res.render('index', {title: 'My Middler Example', name: 'Brian'});
  });
 
server.listen(3000, function() {
  console.log('Listening on http:/localhost:3000');
});

Use the API manually

var path = require('path'),
    http = require('http');
 
var views = require('views').createRegistry({
  // These are the defaults but you can override them.
  layout: 'layout',
  ext: 'hbs',
  engine: 'handlebars'
});
 
// Register a default namespace.
views.register(path.join(__dirname, 'views'));
 
// Register an alternate namespace with custom options.
views.register('jade', path.join(__dirname, 'jade_views'), {ext: 'html', engine: 'jade'});
 
// Now you can use render or renderStatus inside your http request handlers.
var server = http.createServer(function(req, res) {
  if (req.url === '/') {
    views.render(req, res, 'index', {title: 'Home Page'});
  }
  else if (req.url === '/foo') {
    views.render(req, res, 'foo', {title: 'Foo Bar'});
  }
  else {
    // Render status will look for status-404.[ext] and render it.
    // If a matching status template does not exist then it will just write
    // a standard status message.
    views.renderStatus(404);
  }
});
server.listen(8080);

Partials

Views 0.2.x supported 'partials' by pre-rendering templates that were registered with view.partials(). This functionality was removed in 0.3.0 in favor of utilizing native partials support provided by the templating engines themselves. This was done for a few reasons:

• Performance. Previously, all registered partials were re-rendered for every request, whether or not they were used.
• Recursion. To avoid crazy performance costs, partials were cached per request, but this meant ceratin recursive use-cases for partials were broken.
• Simplicity. Partials are complicated. Its seemed prudent to piggy back on the great work being done in consolidate.js and template engines rather than reinvent the wheel.

Developed by Terra Eclipse

Terra Eclipse, Inc. is a nationally recognized political technology and strategy firm located in Aptos, CA and Washington, D.C.

License: MIT

Copyright (C) 2012 Terra Eclipse, Inc. (http://www.terraeclipse.com)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.