express-view ships with a custom express view class implementation which allows to control res.render() calls. Normally, express along with some specific view engine can do the work of compiling and rendering templates on the server side, but express-view span that to support the use of compiled-to-javascript templates that were already provisioned in memory thru a filesystem abstraction component like locator.
var express = require('express'),
expview = require('express-view'),
app = express();
app.set('locator', myLocatorObj); // filesystem abstraction layer
expview.extend(app);
With the code above, there is not need to define anything else in express in terms of engine, or path to views, or anything else, all that is irrelevant since express-view will completely take over the express's template resolution process, and will drive it thru myLocatorObj abtraction, which means you can call res.render('foo') in your middleware, and express-view will resolve foo template. express-view will try to find foo template thru the locator instance API, and it will fallback to the regular express implementation if the template is not found, in case you need to mix-in synthetic views and traditional views.
You can also define a default layout:
app.set('layout', 'name-of-the-layout-template');
If you use layout as above, or just by providing the layout value when calling res.render('foo', { layout: 'bar' }), express-view will resolve the view, render it, and the result of that operation will be passed into the layout render thru a context variable called outlet, this is similar to emberjs. In a handlebars template, you will define the outlet like this:
<div>{{{outlet}}}</div>
Locator organizes templates per bundle (which are usually NPM dependencies that contain compiled templates). By default, the root bundle in your locator object will be used to resolve templates, and you have the ability to specify which bundle should be used to resolve the template::
res.render('foo', {
bundle: 'name-of-the-bundle'
});
If the template foo is not found in the specified bundle, express-view will look into the root bundle, or fallback to the traditional express view resolution process.
Under the example folder you can see a more detailed example of how to use express-view.
Also, for more information about the new feature in express that powers express-view, read this:
This software is free to use under the Yahoo! Inc. BSD license. See the LICENSE file for license text and copyright information.
See the CONTRIBUTING.md file for more information.