Question

I constantly find myself using this idiom in KO-based HTML templates:

<!-- ko if: isEdit -->
<td><input type="text" name="email" data-bind="value: email" /></td>
<!-- /ko -->
<!-- ko ifnot: isEdit -->
<td data-bind="text: email"></td>
<!-- /ko -->

Is there a better/cleaner way to do conditionals in KO, or is there a better approach than just using traditional if-else constructs?

Also, I would just like to point out that some versions of Internet Explorer (IE 8/9) don’t parse the above example correctly. Please see this SO question for more information. The quick summary is, don’t use comments (virtual bindings) inside table tags to support IE. Use the tbody instead:

<tbody data-bind="if: display"><tr><td>hello</td></tr></tbody>

Answer 1

There are a couple different ways that you can handle this type of code.

• with an if/ifnot combination like you are now. This works fine and is not terribly verbose.

• Michael Best’s switch/case binding (https://github.com/mbest/knockout-switch-case) is quite flexible and can let you easily handle this and more complicated ones (more states than true/false).

• Another option is to use dynamic templates. You would bind an area to one or more templates with the template name being used based on an observable. Here is a post that I wrote on this topic a while back: http://www.knockmeout.net/2011/03/quick-tip-dynamically-changing.html. In your scenario, it might look like:

<td data-bind="template: $root.getCellTemplate"></td>

<script id="cellEditTmpl" type="text/html">
    <input type="text" name="email" data-bind="value: email" />
</script>

<script id="cellTmpl" type="text/html">
    <span data-bind="text: email"></span>
</script>

The getCellTemplate function could live wherever, but would be given the item ($data) as the first argument and would return the name of the template to use.