Skip to content

Templating (Mustache)

Templating is when you return an html page with custom data. You can probably tell why that's useful.

Crow supports mustache for templates through its own implementation crow::mustache.

Components of mustache

There are 2 components of a mustache template implementation:

  • Page
  • Context

Page

The HTML page (including the mustache tags). It is usually loaded into crow::mustache::template_t. It needs to be placed in the templates directory which should be directly inside the current working directory of the crow executable.

For more information on how to formulate a template, see this mustache manual.

Context

A JSON object containing the tags as keys and their values. crow::mustache::context is actually a crow::json::wvalue.

Returning a template

To return a mustache template, you need to load a page using auto page = crow::mustache::load("path/to/template.html");, keep in mind that the path is relative to the templates directory.
You also need to set up the context by using crow::mustache::context ctx;. Then you need to assign the keys and values, this can be done the same way you assign values to a json write value (ctx["key"] = value;).
With your context and page ready, just return page.render(ctx);. This will use the context data to return a filled template.
Alternatively you could just render the page without a context using return page.render();.