NAME

       Dancer::Template::Abstract - abstract class for Dancer's template engines

VERSION

       version 1.3202

DESCRIPTION

       This class is provided as a base class for each template engine. Any template engine must
       inherit from it and provide a set of methods described below.

TEMPLATE TOKENS

       By default Dancer injects some tokens (or variables) to templates. The available tokens
       are:

       "perl_version"
           The current running Perl version.

       "dancer_version"
           The current running Dancer version.

       "settings"
           Hash to access current application settings.

       "request"
           Hash to access your current request.

       "params"
           Hash to access your request parameters.

       "vars"
           Hash to access your defined variables (using "vars").

       "session"
           Hash to access your session (if you have session enabled)

INTERFACE

       init()
           The template engine can overload this method if some initialization stuff has to be
           done before the template engine is used.

           The base class provides a plain init() method that only returns true.

       default_tmpl_ext()
           Template class that inherits this class should override this method to return a
           default template extension, example: for Template::Toolkit it returns "tt" and for
           HTML::Mason it returns "mason".  So when you call "template 'index';" in your dispatch
           code, Dancer will look for a file 'index.tt' or 'index.mason' based on the template
           you use.

           Note 1: when returning the extension string, please do not add a dot in front of the
           extension as Dancer will do that.

           Note 2: for backwards compatibility abstract class returns "tt" instead of throwing an
           exception 'method not implemented'.

           User would be able to change the default extension using the "<extension">
           configuration variable on the template configuration. For example, for the default
           ("Simple") engine:

                template: "simple"
                engines:
                  simple:
                    extension: 'tmpl'

       view($view)
           The default behavior of this method is to return the path of the given view, appending
           the default template extension (either the value of the "extension" setting in the
           configuration, or the value returned by "default_tmpl_ext") if it is not present in
           the view name given and no layout template with that exact name existed.  (In other
           words, given a layout name "main", if "main" exists in the layouts dir, it will be
           used; if not, "main.tmpl" (where "tmpl" is the value of the "extension" setting, or
           the value returned by "default_tmpl_ext") will be looked for.)

       view_exists($view_path)
           By default, Dancer::Template::Abstract checks to see if it can find the view file
           calling "view_exists($path_to_file)". If not, it will generate a nice error message
           for the user.

           If you are using extending Dancer::Template::Abstract to use a template system with
           multiple document roots (like Text::XSlate or Template), you can override this method
           to always return true, and therefore skip this check.

       layout($layout, $tokens, $content)
           The default behavior of this method is to merge a content with a layout.  The layout
           file is looked for with similar logic as per "view" - an exact match first, then
           attempting to append the default template extension, if the view name given did not
           already end with it.

       render($self, $template, $tokens)
           This method must be implemented by the template engine. Given a template and a set of
           tokens, it returns a processed string.

           If $template is a reference, it's assumed to be a reference to a string that contains
           the template itself. If it's not a reference, it's assumed to be the path to template
           file, as a string. The render method will then have to open it and read its content
           (Dancer::FileUtils::read_file_content does that job).

           This method's return value must be a string which is the result of the interpolation
           of $tokens in $template.

           If an error occurs, the method should trigger an exception with "die()".

           Examples :

               # with a template as a file
               $content = $engine->render('/my/template.txt', { var => 42 };

               # with a template as a scalar
               my $template = "here is <% var %>";
               $content = $engine->render(\$template, { var => 42 });

AUTHOR

       This module has been written by Alexis Sukrieh, see Dancer for details.

AUTHOR

       Dancer Core Developers

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       This software is copyright (c) 2010 by Alexis Sukrieh.

       This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as
       the Perl 5 programming language system itself.