NAME

Dancer::Template::HtmlTemplate - HTML::Template wrapper for Dancer

DESCRIPTION

This class is an interface between Dancer's template engine abstraction layer and the HTML::Template module.

In order to use this engine, use the template setting:

    template: HtmlTemplate

This can be done in your config.yml file or directly in your app code with the set keyword.

Since HTML::Template uses different syntax to other template engines like Template::Toolkit, the default layout main.tt generated by the scaffolding script must be updated to use HTML::Template directives:

    [% content %]

needs to be changed to:

    <!--tmpl_var name="content"-->

or

    <TMPL_VAR name="content">

Future versions of Dancer may ask you which template engine you wish to use, and write the default layout and example templates appropriately.

Also, the current default file extension for template files is .tt; at the time this template engine wrapper was produced, the template engine wrapper could not override default file extensions. This is now possible, but I haven't made this change as it would break applications relying on the default being .tt.

If you want to change the extension used, use the extension configuration option, for example, to declare that the extension should be .tmpl:

    template: HtmlTemplate
    engines:
        HtmlTemplate:
            extension: 'tmpl'

WARNING - Even if you use the default .tt, you may want to explictly set the extension setting to indicate that, as future versions may default to a more suitable file extension.

Handling nested hashrefs

Since HTML::Template does not allow you to access nested hashrefs (at least, not without switching to using HTML::Template::Pluggable along with HTML::Template::Plugin::Dot), this module "flattens" nested hashrefs.

For instance, the session contents are passed to Dancer templates as session - to access a key of that hashref named username, you'd say:

    <TMPL_VAR name="session.username">

SEE ALSO

Dancer, HTML::Template

AUTHOR

David Precious, <davidp@preshweb.co.uk>

CONTRIBUTING

This module is developed on Github at:

http://github.com/bigpresh/Dancer-Template-HtmlTemplate

Feel free to fork the repo and submit pull requests!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Damien Krotkine for providing code to flatten nested hashrefs in a way that allows HTML::Template templates to make use of them.

LICENSE

This module is free software and is released under the same terms as Perl itself.