Meteor Spacebars.toHTML
A simple helper function to assist with rendering spacebars to HTML. Works on both the server and the client.
Installation
$ meteor add dburles:spacebars-tohtmlAPI
Super basic example
Spacebars.toHTML({ name: 'foo' }, '<p>Hello {{name}}</p>');Any helpers defined with Template.registerHelper will be rendered just like usual. If you're on the server you'll need to make sure they're not just defined on the client so it can see them.
Rendering templates on the server
We can render templates on the server by creating files within the private directory.
For example, we could create private/example.html and its contents might look like:
<html>
<head>
<title>Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Example</h1>
<p>Hello {{name}} this is just an example!</p>
</body>
</html>We can then render it using Meteor's Assets API
var html = Spacebars.toHTML({ name: 'foo' }, Assets.getText('example.html'));This is very useful for sending HTML emails.
Iron Router
We can also serve templates using Iron Router's server side routes.
Here's a simple example:
Router.route('/test', function() {
// This could also come from a Collection
var data = { name: 'foo' };
this.response.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/html' });
this.response.end(Spacebars.toHTML(data, Assets.getText('example.html')));
}, { where: 'server' });Template inclusion
Server side only
Currently there's no way to pull in templates using the {{> inclusion}} operator, though we can create our own helper to do much the same thing.
Template.registerHelper('include', function(template, data) {
data = data || {};
return Spacebars.toHTML(data, Assets.getText(template));
});and within our template, for example:
<nav>
{{{include 'navigation.html'}}}
</nav>
...We can also pass in an optional data context:
<nav>
{{{include 'navigation.html' navItems}}}
</nav>
...Note that we use the triple-stash here so the HTML is not escaped.
License
MIT