I’m a Javascript and Nodejs newb and I’m not sure how to best organize things. I’m writing a web interface for a C++ application by using Nodejs and V8 convert to wrap a C++ API. The question I have is, is there some way I can use Express to serve HTML that has references to functions/global inside nodejs? Or do I have to resort to having a bunch of res.write(html) types of calls in the HTML in order to do that?
For example, I want to prefill form data with stuff that’s accessed from a C++ configuration API. The C++ API is wrapped in a Nodejs module. Right now anything that needs to be dynamically generated (like prefilled forms) I just do something like,
var novaconfig = require('./NodeAppConfig/build/Release/appconfig');
var AppConfiguration = new Appconfig.AppConfigBinding();
var express=require('express');
var app = express.createServer(express_options);
app.configure(function () {
app.use(express.methodOverride());
app.use(express.bodyParser());
app.use(app.router);
});
app.get('/configureApplication.html', function(req, res) {
console.log("[200] " + req.method + " to " + req.url);
res.writeHead(200, "OK", {'Content-Type': 'text/html'});
res.write('<HTML>');
res.write('<HEAD>');
res.write(' <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="configstyle.css" media="screen">');
res.write('</HEAD>');
res.write('<BODY>');
res.write('<label>');
res.write(Interface);
res.write('</label>');
res.write('<form method="post" action="/configureNovaSave">');
res.write('<input type="text" name="interface" value="');
res.write(AppConfiguration.GetCurrentInterface());
res.write('" /><br />');
res.write('<input type="submit" name="submitbutton" id="submitbutton" value="Save Settings" />');
res.write('</form>');
res.write("<br/>");
res.write('</BODY>');
res.write('</HTML>');
res.end();
});
But this is obviously a bad way to do it. Is there a way to have the dynamically generated HTML in a stand alone file and then still access AppConfiguration.GetCurrentInterface() within it? What’s a good way to organize the files for something like this?
I think what you want is a template engine. Maybe take a look at Jade or Mustache. Then you just pass in the parts you want to be dynamic and the engine renders the page for you.