How do I render a jQuery.tmpl Template to a String?

Question

The documentation for jquery.tmpl uses .appendTo to insert the template into the DOM during the rendering process:

$.tmpl( myTemplate, myData ).appendTo( "#target" );

I am attempting to convert an existing app from another templating engine, and my code needs to render a template into a string first before it is added to the DOM. Is this possible? How would that be done?

Answer 1

The answers here didn't help me, however Adam's reply set me on the right track: any jQuery wrapped element has a .html() method.

var output = $( "#infoWindowTemplate" ).tmpl( city_data ).html()

or if you need text...

var output = $( "#infoWindowTemplate" ).tmpl( city_data ).text()

but please take note, that the outermost(root) element of the template is skipped, so you should make your templates look something like this:

  <script id='infoWindowTemplate' type='text/x-jquery-tmpl'> 
    <div class='city_info'>
      <h1 class='title'><a href="${link}">${name}</a></h1>
      <p class='meta'>${count} offers</p>
    </div>
  </script> 

or just use the jQuery outerHtml plugin ( http://darlesson.com/jquery/outerhtml/ ) and replace .html() with .outerHTML()

Answer 2

You could do it by just putting the result in a temporary container and taking the innerHTML of it, like this:

var str = $("<div />").append($.tmpl(myTemplate, myData)).html();

Answer 3

jQuery.tmpl returns an HTMLElement wrapped in a jQuery object, which could be used in the same way as rendered strings were in the old template system.

var $template = $('#template'),
    html = $.tmpl($template, data).get();

I suspect that this might actually be faster than regular strings, but I don't have any profiling data for this yet.

---

Update

I did some basic profiling between Mustache.js and jQuery.tmpl, and the stats do not look good.

I started with 1,000 preloaded records and generated templates for them several times, averaging the results.

Mustache.js: 1783ms
jQuery.tmpl: 2243ms

I might wait until jQuery.tmpl closes that gap before switching.

Answer 4

jQuery Templating provides $.template() (see description in source code) - it returns array of strings after evaluating cached template with your data. I am writing from scratch (and from experiments in Chrome's console), but you'll get the whole idea.

1. Create and cache a named template function

   $("template-selector").template("template-name");
   

2. Get your template function and invoke it with your data

   var tmpl = $.template("template-name"); // template function
   var strings = tmpl($, {data: {<your data here>}}); // array of strings
   var output = strings.join(''); // single string
   

Answer 5

You can prepare template data like this

var tmplData = {link:"your link",name:"yourname",count:5};
$("#idofelementwhereuwanttoappend").append($("#infoWindowTemplate").tmpl(tmpldata));

This idofelementwhereuwanttoappend is id where your template data will be rendered.

Answer 6

This works correctly

    var s = $.tmpl(url, dataContext).get()[0].data;

I was wrong, above example works only if returned is somethig other that html. In case of html I use

    var s = $.tmpl(url, dataContext).get()[0].outerHTML

EDIT: After some digging I discovered diffrences between Chrome and FF (above examples works in Chrome).

Finally I found cross browser working method, lets assume that we like to build a tag. So we template will look like

    <a href='${url}'>${text}</a>

them simplest way to get resul as a string is to wrap template inside any tag and then use .html() function

    var t = '<div><a href='${url}'>${text}</a></div>'
    var d = {url: 'stackoverflow.com', text: 'best site'};
    var html = $.tmpl(s, d).get()[0];
    html = $(html).html();  // trick is here