Marionette.Renderer

The Renderer object was extracted from the ItemView rendering process, in order to create a consistent and re-usable method of rendering a template with or without data.

Documentation Index

• Basic Usage
• Pre-compiled Templates
• Custom Template Selection And Rendering
• Using Pre-compiled Templates

Basic Usage

The basic usage of the Renderer is to call the render method. This method returns a string containing the result of applying the template using the data object as the context.

var template = "#some-template";
var data = {foo: "bar"};
var html = Marionette.Renderer.render(template, data);

// do something with the HTML here

If you pass a template that coerces to a falsey value, the render method will throw an exception stating that there was no template provided.

Pre-compiled Templates

If the template parameter of the render function is itself a function, the renderer treats this as a pre-compiled template and does not try to compile it again. This allows any view that supports a template parameter to specify a pre-compiled template function as the template setting.

var myTemplate = _.template("<div>foo</div>");
Marionette.ItemView.extend({
  template: myTemplate
});

The template function does not have to be any specific template engine. It only needs to be a function that returns valid HTML as a string from the data parameter passed to the function.

Custom Template Selection And Rendering

By default, the renderer will take a jQuery selector object as the first parameter, and a JSON data object as the optional second parameter. It then uses the TemplateCache to load the template by the specified selector, and renders the template with the data provided (if any) using Underscore.js templates.

If you wish to override the way the template is loaded, see the TemplateCache object.

If you wish to override the template engine used, change the render method to work however you want:

Marionette.Renderer.render = function(template, data){
  return $(template).tmpl(data);
};

This implementation will replace the default Underscore.js rendering with jQuery templates rendering.

If you override the render method and wish to use the TemplateCache mechanism, remember to include the code necessary to fetch the template from the cache in your render method:

Marionette.Renderer.render = function(template, data){
  var template = Marionette.TemplateCache.get(template);
  // Do something with the template here
};

Using Pre-compiled Templates

You can easily replace the standard template rendering functionality with a pre-compiled template, such as those provided by the JST or TPL plugins for AMD/RequireJS.

To do this, just override the render method to return your executed template with the data.

Marionette.Renderer.render = function(template, data){
  return template(data);
};

Then you can specify the pre-compiled template function as your view's template attribute:

var myPrecompiledTemplate = _.template("<div>some template</div>");

Marionette.ItemView.extend({
  template: myPrecompiledTemplate
});