In lesson 9, you constructed a routing system for your Express.js application. In this lesson, you learn about templating engines and see how to connect your routes to views. You learn how to work with Embedded JavaScript (EJS), a syntax for applying Java-Script functions and variables within your views, as well as how to pass data into those views from your controllers. You start by setting up EJS with your application and seeing how templating engines work. By the end of the lesson, you’ll understand the syntax needed to master EJS in your Express.js applications. At the end of the lesson, you install the express-ejs-layouts package to use dynamic layouts in your application.
This lesson covers
- Connecting a templating engine to your application
- Passing data from your controllers to your views
- Setting up Express.js layouts
Consider this
You have some wireframes laying out how your application pages will look, and you notice that many of the pages share components. Your home page and contact page both use the same navigation bar. Instead of rewriting the HTML representing the navigation bar for each view, you want to write the code once and reuse it for each view.
With templating in a Node.js application, you can do just that. In fact, you’ll be able to render a single layout for all your application pages or share view content in code snippets called partials.
10.1. Connecting a templating engine