jQuery-Mustache - A jQuery Plugin for working with Mustache.js

jQuery-Mustache.js is a jQuery Plugin which makes working light work of using the Mustache templating engine via a bit of jQuery magic.

Installation

jQuery-Mustache has two dependencies:

• jQuery 1.5 or later.
• Mustache.js 0.4 or later.

As with all jQuery plugins, just ensure that you load jQuery before you load jQuery-mustache.js, for example:

<script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.7.1.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://raw.github.com/jonnyreeves/jquery-Mustache/master/jquery.mustache.js"></script>
<script src="https://raw.github.com/janl/mustache.js/master/mustache.js"></script>

Usage

Lets get down to it and load an external template and then render it.

var viewData = { name: 'Jonny' };
$.Mustache.load('./templates/greetings.htm')
	.done(function () {
    	$('body').mustache('simple-hello', viewData);
    });

In the above example we are loading an external template HTML file (greetings.htm) and, once it's finished loading we render it out replacing the contents of the body element. Your templates should be defined in a script block in the external HTML file where the script block's id will define the template's name, eg:

<script id="simple-hello" type="text/html">
    <p>Hello, {{name}}, how are you?</p>
</script>

You can also add templates directly either as String literals or by referencing other DOM elements, eg:

$.Mustache.add('string-template', '<p>Hi, {{name}}, this is an inline template<p>');

// These two are identical, the latter just provides a terser syntax.
$.Mustache.add('dom-template', $('#dom-template').html());
$.Mustache.addFromDom('dom-template');

If you prefer to have all your templates stored in the DOM (as opposed to loading them from external files) then you can just call $.Mustache.addFromDom() without any arguments, this will read in all templates from any <script type="text/html" /> blocks in your markup.

There are two ways to render a Mustache template, either via the global $.Mustache.render() method or via the jQuery mustache selector:

$.Mustache.render('my-template', viewData);		// Returns a String (the rendered template content)
$('#someElement').mustache('my-template', viewData);	// Returns a jQuery selector for chaining.

The jQuery mustache selector defaults to appending the rendered template to the selected element; however you can change this behaviour by passing a method in the options argument:

// Replace the contents of #someElement with the rendered template.
$('#someElement').mustache('my-template', viewData, { method: 'html' });

// Prepend the rendered Mustache template to #someElement.
$('#someElement').mustache('my-template', viewData, { method: 'prepend' });

The mustache selector also allows you to pass an Array of View Models to render which makes populating lists a breeze:

// Clear #someList and then render all the viewModels using the list-template.
$('#someList).empty().mustache('list-template', viewModels);

To help you debug you can fetch a list of all registered templates via $.Mustache.templates() and when you're done, you can call $.Mustache.clear() to remove all templates.

jQuery-Mustache plays nicely with partials as well, no muss, no fuss, just drop the partial into your template, ensure that it's been loaded and jQuery-Mustache will take care of the rest:

<!-- Templates.htm -->
<script id="footer-fragment" type="text/html">
	<p>&copy; Jonny {{year}}</p>
</script>
<script id="webcontent" type="text/html">
	<h1><blink>My {{adjective}} WebSite!</blink></h1>
	
	{{! Insert the `footer-fragment` template below }}
	{{>footer-fragment}}
</script>

$.Mustache.load('templates.htm')
	.done(function () {
		// Renders the `webcontent` template and the `footer-fragment` template to the page.
		$('body').mustache('webcontent', { year: 2012, adjective: 'EPIC' }); 
	});

Check out the included example file for other usage scenarios.