Making regions more usable.

[tmeasday]

Howdy @cmather

So I'm working on converting Verso over to BL and it makes heavy use of layouts. One thing that we used to do with our old janky layouts system was bind helpers to regions. So something like

<template name="somePage">
  {{#Layout template='pageLayout' title=title}}
    ...
  {{/Layout}}
</template>

<template name="pageLayout">
  <h1>{{> yield region='title'}}</h1>
 {{> yield}}
</template>

Template.somePage.title = function() { return 'Dashboard'; }

So essentially we are passing the content for a region in via the arguments to {{#Layout.

What do you think?

Related ideas:

• set a region content to a template in a similar way? titleTemplate='foo' perhaps?
• remove the need for the redundant feeling title=title and just automatically search for a helper named title when trying to {{> yield region='title'}} if no content is set for that region.

Happy to implement whatever (actually I'll probably implement the first thing right now in a branch) if you agree on the API..

[tmeasday]

I went ahead and did this an added {{> yield region='foo' text='true'}} to deal with differentiating between setting templates and setting text. Let's discuss soon :)

[cmather]

Hey @tmeasday! Sorry for the delay. I'm trying to understand the idea but not sure I'm getting it. So, in the first example, are you trying to set the content for the 'title' region by passing its value as an argument to Layout? Where does title's value from from? Is it dynamic? Why go through the trouble of creating a yield region in this case vs. just putting some dynamic content in the layout. What am I missing :)?

[tmeasday]

Hey @cmather. I'll try to be clearer about the base use case and then perhaps my comments above will make more sense.

We're using layouts to wrap the contents of a template in standard boilerplate. As an example, the title of the page is included in the boilerplate. For some pages, the title is fixed -- for others it's dynamic. I was talking about a case where the title is dynamic, and thus a helper on the outer template (Template.somePage.title above).

With the current API, we could just do:

<template name="somePage">
  {{#Layout template='pageLayout}}
    {{#contentFor region='title'}}{{title}}{{/contentFor}}
   {{/Layout}}
</template>

But I'm looking for a way to set the content or template (both are important) for a region more directly when calling {{#Layout.

[tmeasday]

I realise you probably haven't had time to think about this, but when you can circle back round I have a quick qn in regards to this:

If I render a layout with helper argument (like {{#Layout regionX=helper}}), how does the component receive notice when helper changes?

It doesn't seem like this.get('regionX') is what I'm looking for here - it doesn't seem to be reactive and change when helper changes. But this must work somehow... or is this a limitation of blaze?

[cmather]

Might be a limitation if I recall. I Need to check though.

On Apr 24, 2014, at 11:33 PM, Tom Coleman [email protected] wrote:

I realise you probably haven't had time to think about this, but when you can circle back round I have a quick qn in regards to this:

If I render a layout with helper argument (like {{#Layout regionX=helper}}), how does the component receive notice when helper changes?

It doesn't seem like this.get('regionX') is what I'm looking for here - it doesn't seem to be reactive and change when helper changes. But this must work somehow... or is this a limitation of blaze?

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