README

View Module

View module for gracenode framework.

View module is a very basic templating module for gracenode framework.

How to include it in my project

To add this package as your gracenode module, add the following to your package.json:

"dependencies": {
        "gracenode": "",
        "gracenode-view": ""
}

To use this module in your application, add the following to your gracenode bootstrap code:

var gracenode = require('gracenode');
// this tells gracenode to load the module
gracenode.use('gracenode-view');

To access the module:

// the prefix gracenode- will be removed automatically
gracenode.view

Access

gracenode.view

Configurations

"modules": {
    "view": {
        "preload": ["file path"...], // optional
        "minify": true or false // default is true > minify css and js files
    }
}

API: assign

void assign(String name, mixed value)

Assigns a variable to be embeded to view file(s)

Exmple:

// controller
gracenode.view.assign('foo', 'hello world');
// view file
(:= foo :)
// output
hello world

API: load

void load(String vilewFilePath, Function callback)

Loads a view file.

// controller file
module.exports.index = function (req, res) {
    gracenode.view.assign('foo', 'hello world');
    gracenode.view.load('/foo/index.html', function (error, contentData) {
        if (error) {
            return cb(error);
        }
        res.html(contentData);
    });
};
// this will output "hello world"

How to include view files

<!-- include header HTML file -->
<div class="header">
(:include common/header.html :)
</div>
<!-- include CSS file -->
<style type="text/css">
(:include css/main.css :)
</style>
<!-- include Javascript file -->
<script type="text/javascript">
(:include js/main.js :)
</script>
<!-- include ALL files in the directory -->
<div class="content">
(:include content/ :)
</div>

All included files have access to the variables assigned by assign function.

All assigned variables are also available as Javascript variables in the client under window.gracenode object

.tpl files

When including files with .tpl, view module will remove tags and line breaks. This is useful when you need to inject HTML in to javascript code etc.

Example:

File to be included:

<div>Test</div>
<div>Test2</div>

Javascript code to include the file above:

var htmlTpl = '(:include view/test/test.html.tpl :)';
// this will be:
// var htmlTpl = '<div>Test</div><div>Test2</div>';

Notes

There is no if nor for-loop in view module because view template files are just template files and should not contain any sort of logic.

If you need to generate a list of items or change the display depending on certain conditions, please use Javascript to do so. After all we are using Nodejs.

Usage no npm install needed!