Built-in View Helpers

[jescalan]

So sometimes I miss rails' built-in view helpers that generally make life a lot easier with regards to parsing strings especially. I think it would be cool to include a couple of modules that help out with common tasks that you might need in views.

Reference: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/TextHelper.html

It's worth thinking about how we could modularize and package up these helpers as well. Should we just include them in views and document them, or offer a way for users to toggle them on, etc.

[jescalan]

Just came across this library, which I think would be a greats staring point for the view helpers: https://github.com/HubSpot/humanize

[jescalan]

Here's another great one for dates. Would be killer if moment was built in: http://momentjs.com/

[zspecza]

I've used moment before. It is super awesome - would trust it over the HubSpot one any day (any code I've used from HubSpot breaks bower in roots so I no trusty) in terms of time formatting. For capitalizing, titleizing and the like, I'd use underscore.string.

[samccone]

+1000 momentjs

[jescalan]

Woah, underscore.string looks great. I'll look into that a little further, but looks incredible.

[zspecza]

underscore.string is great, I used it for string manipulation to test out my CSS preprocessor idea, as I didn't have any knowledge of compilers at the time. But now I've got an understanding of parsing, tokenizing and so on. :) underscore.string gave me nothing but joy at the time! You'll enjoy it too, for sure.

[jescalan]

This feature has landed on the release branch. Roots ships with underscore, underscore.string, and moment by default, and you can also include your own view helper bundles through app.coffee. Whoo!

[airtonix]

@Jenius can you elaborate more on how we can bundle our own view helpers?

ideally I was hoping for this :

locals:
  something: ""
  something: ""
  something: ""
  darkside: require './view_helpers/darkside' 

Or even better, simply require each file in config.view_helpers directory:

module.exports.darkside = (something) ->
 ...

[jescalan]

@airtonix You can do it this way with roots v3, which is currently what's being actively developed. You can test out the latest v3 prerelease with npm i roots@pre -g.

In v3, you can run this in your app.coffee file and it will work:

module.exports =
  ignore: ['view_helpers/*']
  locals:
    foo: require('./view_helpers/foo')