I’m implementing my own template engine for expressjs in node.js and, per the documentation (http://expressjs.com/guide.html#view-partials), I’d like to be able to render partials within a view.
The Short Story: How do I call “partial” and have it return a string, rather than immediately sending the result to the browser?
The Long Story: The problem is that I can’t figure out where the “.partial” function is outside of res.partial… which immediately sends its result to the browser, ignoring the view containing it. I’ve checked the other template engine sources for the word partial, but only find render, and when I looked at the express code… I couldn’t find the reference outside of the response object either.
Question Inception: Maybe I’m doing this all wrong? I can’t figure out the magic behind the scenes… so I might just be missing something terribly obvious.
I went through a similar issue when looking to get Mustache working because I don’t care for EJS templates or its derivatives. TJ Hallowaychuck, the main author of Express, has announced that he is dropping internal support for partials in the upcoming v3.0 as he feels this should be the responsibility of the template engine, not express. So if you were looking in the Git repo for the word “partial” you will be hard pressed to find anything.
Time to roll your own partial support into your custom template engine. I would take a look at the source for “Handlebars.js” for some inspiration on how to get it done.