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

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.

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.

layout($layout, $tokens, $content)

The default behavior of this method is to merge a content with a layout.

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 });

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