Nugget Post: Golang HTML Templates

Golang authors have an excellent article on how to build a wiki web application entirely out of go. Towards the middle of the article, they mention the html/template package. For those of you familiar with templating systems like jade, handlebars, or flask/jinja… you should feel right at home. In golang, templating needs no third party frameworks, no extensions… it comes right out the box.

But, I did have a big “D’Oh” moment when using this engine for the first time. While looking up how to include conditional (if…else) and iterative (for loop) structures in the template I ran into a brick wall and simply couldn’t find the syntax. I automatically assumed all the documentation for the package was under the URL:

http://golang.org/pkg/html/template/

No mention of the syntax for the structures I needed. I quite by accident then ran across the text/template package and documentation here:

http://golang.org/pkg/text/template/

The first paragraph mentions:

To generate HTML output, see package html/template, which has the same interface as this package but automatically secures HTML output against certain attacks.

So I tried out the control structures there and it worked perfectly… As an example (using bootstrap for CSS), say we would like to display a bunch of alerts whose content is retrieved from a golang array:


/*
Start Webserver Section
*/
type Page struct {
Title string
Body string
Alerts []string
}
func renderTemplate(w http.ResponseWriter, tmpl string, p *Page) {
err := templates.ExecuteTemplate(w, tmpl+".html", p)
if err != nil {
http.Error(w, err.Error(), http.StatusInternalServerError)
}
}

view raw

stuctArray.go

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in the above, we note the “Alerts” string array contained within a “Page” struct, and just as explained in the golang article, we have a function to render templates that accept a variable p which is a pointer to the struct.

Within the html file that is rendered by the html/template package, we have the following:


<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.2.0/css/bootstrap.min.css">
<script src="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.2.0/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div class="container well">
<h2>Alerts</h2>
<hr>
{{range $element := .Alerts}}
<div class="alert alert-danger">{{$element}}</div>
{{end}}
</div>
</body>
</html>

Note lines 10-12. Golang uses the familiar double curly brackets to enclose it’s syntax within a template. In this example, we used the “range” syntax to assign each element of the array Alerts to the variable $element, which is in turn used within the div.

Make sure to checkout http://golang.org/pkg/text/template/ for more examples of the logic that you can place within templates

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