readme.md

SharePoint Display Templates with Handlebars and LiveReload

Sample code for creating Display Template with Handlebars and LiveReload.

Here is how it's going to work

Liberaries and Tools

You may need a slight understanding of the below liberaries and tools:

• Handlebars
• LiveReload
• Babel
• webpack
• ESLint, Karma, Mocha, Chai

Display Template

The Sharepoint Display Template File

Code that goes into the Display Template: (See full code here)

    <script>
        $includeScript(this.url, "~site/Style Library/scripts/debugging-display-template.bundle.js");
    </script>


    <div id="Control_List">
      <!--#_
      var HtmlToRender = window.NamespacedDebugTemplateRenderer(ctx);
      _#-->
      _#= HtmlToRender =#_
    </div>

The Handlebars Template

The Handlebars template is a .html file as seen in template.html

The JavaScript functions used within the Handlebars template are namespaced like so: onmouseover='DebuggerFunctions.onHover(this)'

Template Function Definitions

This is sort of like the code behind file for the Handlebars template. You have to create a TemplateBuilder class as done in template.js

The Handlebars template is imported into this file. See the handlebars-loader to know how this works.

Apart from the constructor method you will need to create a method getNamespacedTemplateEvents where the namespaced events are defined.

Using the template

The index.js file defines a function which takes the display template's context and returns HTML as a string. This function is called from the SharePoint display template)

This is also the entry point for webpack. See webpack's configuration.

Important lines of code

const debuggerTemplate = new DebuggerTemplate(window);
return debuggerTemplate.renderAsString({ items });

This creates an object of the TemplateBuilder class and the namespaced functions are assigned to the DOM window. And the HTML is generated from binding the template to the data and returned as a string.

Unit Testing

The unit testing is run using Karma. It is configured to run in both IE and Chrome. See configuration file here.

Running the unit tests: npm run test

Test Helper

The template-test-helper.js defines a function renderTemplate which takes a class inhereted from TemplateBuilder and data as its parameters and returns a jQuery object of the rendered html's first element.

Writing Unit Tests

The unit test files can be placed anywhere within the src folder but has to end with the extention .spec.js

We have couple of testcases written for the persentage-column JSLink script here.

Using the template-test-helper.js we get the jQuery object of the persent-column template's root element.

The Asserts are done using the chai-jquery liberary.

Build

Generating the bundled and minified file for development: npm run dev

Generating the bundled and minified file for production: npm run build

Configuring the Display Template in a Content Search Webpart

This should be done using code but this is out of scope of this repo. You can follow manual steps for doing this:

1. Copy the debugging-display-template.bundle.js present in CDN\scripts folder (after bulding ofcourse) to the SiteCollection's Style Liberary in a folder called scripts.
2. Upload the display template to a publishing site's Master page gallery into the display templates folder.
3. Create a Content Search webpart and select the Display Template in its options.

Live Reload

Continuously build and host files and start the LiveReload server: npm start

Injecting the LiveReload script tag on the SharePoint Page. Use this Chrome Extention - LiveReload

Replacing the browser's requests for the script file from server with requests to localhost:7777. This is done using the Chrome Extention Switcheroo Redirector.

If you wish to change the port number to something else, see the cnd script command in the package.json file.

That's it! This should now enable livereloading.