buffer.string() doesn't work

[amk221]

Appending a view renders the buffer to a string, but one cannot access the string() directly.

example failure: http://jsbin.com/hafubakokape/1/edit?js,output
related forum post: http://discuss.emberjs.com/t/how-to-render-a-template-to-a-string/6136/7

[mmun]

The error is correct. You can't manually render a view like this outside of the rendering process.

You probably don't want to do template({ name: 'Fred' }); with an Ember template. Most helpers that Ember provides expect there to be a view to be present (via options.data.view) in order to setup observers and bindings.

In theory, you could try

template({ name: 'Fred' }, {
  data: {
    buffer: someBuffer
  }
});

// use someBuffer.string();

Instead, I recommend compiling your own templates with Handlebars.compile (not Ember.Handlebars.compile) these are better suited for what you want to do.

[amk221]

Ah ok, sorry for the trouble.

[mmun]

@amk221 No trouble at all. :)

[DougPuchalski]

@mmun Would it be reasonable to Ember.View to have a public function that would allow its template to be rendered to a string, using unbound properties from a given context? Third party libraries that need a string of HTML seem inevitable. In 1.0.7 I was happily sharing my view templates.

[mmun]

@aceofspades That sounds reasonable. Could you explain the use case more? Why do you want to use an Ember Handlebars template for this, rather than a vanilla Handlebars template? Are you using it both the "standard" way as well as for string serialization?

[DougPuchalski]

I assume vanilla would be just fine. Adapting your example

buffer = Ember.RenderBuffer();
App.__container__.lookup('template:item')({}, {data: {buffer: buffer}})

bombs on _triageMustache which is calling EmberHandlebars and expects a container.

Is there some other way to fetch the raw template markup that I'm missing so handlebars could be used directly?

[mmun]

Vanilla Handlebars-compiled templates don't use a buffer. That's a construct unique to the Ember Handlebars compiler and Ember's view layer. Here's an example of what I meant by a vanilla template

var template = Handlebars.compile("Hey {{name}}!");
var output = template({name: "aceofspaces"});

[DougPuchalski]

Even better--all I am missing now is how to fetch the raw markup from the template. Am I missing something blatantly obvious?

[mmun]

@aceofspades not sure what you mean. The output is a string of HTML

var template = Handlebars.compile("Hey <em>{{name}}</em>!");
var output = template({name: "aceofspaces"}); // Hey <em>aceofspaces</em>!

[DougPuchalski]

@mmun The input is the problem, i.e. getting "Hey <em>{{name}}</em>!" from the source template.hbs. Maybe this an ember-cli thing, which precompiles all the templates up front?

[mmun]

The template source is not accessible. Yes, you'll need to set up ember-cli to precompile them with Handlebars.precompile vs Ember.Handlebars.precompile but I don't think such an add-on exists.

[amk221]

Ah yes - I think the confusion comes from the work ember-cli kindly does. One assumes that the precompiled ember-handlebars-templates would be useable for non-ember stuff.
My particular use case is:

didInsertElement: function() {
  template = this.container.lookup('template:suggestion');
  this.$().typeahead { minLength:2 }, { templates: { suggestion: template } ... }
  // But instead I am using _.template('{{foo}}');
}

[DougPuchalski]

It seems there is a feature loss, not listed as a breaking change, from 1.0.7 to 1.0.8, that a precompiled template cannot be rendered to a string outside the context of the DOM (maybe this can be stated more accurately by someone more familiar with internals). Several posts on discourse and elsewhere show how to render to a string and no longer work.

This seems like an important feature to have, it certainly breaks my app.

@mmun thanks for taking the time to comment.

[miguelcobain]

My use case is to integrate with ember-selectize, an integration between ember and selectize.

Selectize accepts render functions to render its options, items, etc. These functions have to return strings.
It would be great if we could have handlebars templates to customize rendering. I basically need to render a template with a context, get it's string and give it to selectize. I've got that covered, but not the part of getting a string.

I understand the problem. I'm using bindings in my template, I can't expect the bindings to work with a string. But would it be possible to render an Ember template without bindings (just using the current context)?
Later, if the properties changed, i could trigger a re-render on selectize to make it call this render function again.

So, i guess this feature may be important to integrate with other libraries (like i've seen here with typeahead.js).

Related issue: miguelcobain/ember-selectize#13