Monday, 28 April 2014

An Introduction to JQuery Templates

JQuery Templates enable you to display and manipulate data in the browser. For example, you can use jQuery Templates to format and display a set of database records that you have retrieved with an Ajax call.

We will go through the basics of JQuery templates and then see an example usage. To use JQuery template you need to include the jquery-tmpl javascript file.

You can get this at
https://github.com/BorisMoore/jquery-pl/blob/master/jquery.tmpl.min.js
and copy the contents and save it in a file with whatever name you want.
Let’s use ‘jquery.tmpl.min.js’ (same as in the source).

You also need JQuery. You can get JQuery 1.10 here
http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.2.min.js
Save this also in the similar way.

Here’s the complete code:

<!DOCTYPEhtmlPUBLIC"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN""http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<htmlxmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Intro</title>

</head>
<body>

<divid="pageContent"style="">

<h1>Widgets Gallery</h1>
<divid="widgetsContainer"></div>

</div>

<scriptid="widgetsTemplate"type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl">
<div style="border:1px solid;text-align:center;height:150px;width:450px" >
<img style="height:60px" src="${picture}" alt="" />
<h2>${title}</h2>
            Price: ${formatPrice(price)}
</div>
</script>

<scripttype="text/javascript"src="jquery-1.10.2.min.js"></script>
<scripttype="text/javascript"src="jquery.tmpl.min.js"></script>

<scripttype="text/javascript">
// Create an widgets
var widgets = [
            { title: "iPad", price: 37.79, picture: "iPad.png" },
            { title: "Monitor", price: 44.99, picture: "monitor.png" },
            { title: "Printer", price: 4.00, picture: "Printer.png" },

        ];

// Render the books using the template
        $("#widgetsTemplate").tmpl(widgets).appendTo("#widgetsContainer");

function formatPrice(price) {
return"$" + price.toFixed(2);
        }

</script>

</body>
</html>

In above codeyou should notice that the actual template is included in a script tag with a special MIME type of text/x-jQuery-tmpl:











This template is displayed for each of the widgets rendered by the template. The template displays a widgets picture, title, and price.

MIME type of text/x-jQuery-tmpl is used becausewhen a browser encounters a SCRIPT tag with an unknown MIME type, it ignores the content of the tag. This is the behaviour that you want with a template. You don’t want a browser to attempt to parse the contents of a template because this might cause side effects.

For example, the template above includes an <img> tag with a src attribute that points at “${picture}”. You don’t want the browser to attempt to load an image at the URL “${picture}”. Instead, you want to prevent the browser from processing the IMG tag until the ${picture} expression is replaced by with the actual name of an image by the jQuery Templates plugin.

If you are not worried about browser side-effects then you can wrap a template inside any HTML tag that you like. For example, the following DIV tag would also work with the jQuery Templates plugin:










The expression ${…} is used to display the value of a JavaScript expression within a template. For example, the expression ${title} is used to display the value of the widgets title property.

The template is rendered with the help of the tmpl() method. The following statement selects the widgetsTemplateand renders an array of widgets using the widgetsTemplate. The results are appended to a DIV element named widgetsContainerby using the standard jQuery appendTo() method.

$("#widgetsTemplate").tmpl(widgets).appendTo("#widgetsContainer");

So this is the introduction for JQuery Template.This is a very simple templating engine. There are more sophisticated and advanced ones like Handlebars, Moustache etc. Check them out too. Hope you enjoyed this.


About Author:
Vaibhav Patil is enthusiast .net developer who works as associate consultant with Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. He in free time reads and write on various web technologies. He can be contacted at: vaibhav.p@spluspl.com

3 comments:

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