Can Mustache Templates do template extension?
I'm new to Mustache.
Many templating languages (e.g., Django / Jinja) will let you extend a "parent" template like so...
base.html
<html><head></head>
<body>
{% block content %}{% endblock %}
</body>
</html>
frontpage.html
{% extends "base.html" %}
{% block content %}<h1>Foobar!</h1>{% endblock %}
rendered frontpage.html
<html><head></head>
<body>
<h1>Foobar!</h1>
</body>
</html>
I'm aware of Mustache's partials (e.g., {{>content}}), but those seem to be just includes.
Does template extension exist for Mustache? Or, failing that, is there at least some design pattern that effectively turns includes into template extension equivalents.
Answer
I recently found myself in the same boat, except I came from a mako background.
Mustache does not allow for template extension/inheritance but there are a few options available to you that I know of.
You could use partials:
{{>header}} Hello {{name}} {{>footer}}You could inject template pre-processing functions into the context for each template that needs to inherit from some other page:
{{#extendBase}} Hello {{name}} {{/extendBase}}Hash:
{ "name": "Walden", "extendBase": function() { return function(text) { return "<html><head></head>" + render(text) + "</body></html>" } } }Prepend and append the desired HTML to the relevant pages in your controller.
Have a layout template ala:
{{>header}} {{{body}}} {{>footer}}And render the body in your controller, passing that to the layout template as a variable named
body.Implement template inheritance, pre-mustache, in your code that loads templates.
I wouldn't, however, use the triple mustache because I don't want unescaped HTML to be appearing anywhere, it's just too risky in my opinion.
If someone else has a better solution to this problem I'd love to hear it as well, since I haven't yet taken the plunge in any one of these directions.