nknapp
commented
5 years ago I thought I had already written an answer to that, but I see it's not here...
If you are building in interactive application that re-renders a part of the page (i.e. the county-combo) based on an input in another combo, I would suggest you use a full-flegded SPA framework like Vue, React, Ember or Angular. That would be client-side code than.
All that Handlebars really does is: Take a JavaScript-object (or JSON) as input, apply the template and output a text (HTML, markdown, Flat ODF etc). The result, of course, depends on the template. It has no functionality for reacting to user input, re-rendering parts of the page, transfering data-objects from server to client. All that, you have to do yourself.
Personally, I would only suggest to use Handlebars in one of the following cases:
- You want to render an HTML page completely in a NodeJS server without a lot of client-side JavaScript. Some people also use Handlebars to render HTML e-mails.
- You want to convert JSON to a text-format other then HTML.
- You want to render static HTML pages from the command line, but then again, there are other tools that are better suited for this task. For the new Handlebars website, I decided to use VuePress as static-page generator.
elmasbestia
Hi, guys!
I really want to use handlebars but I have too many philosophical questions and so little time!
Perhaps you may guide me or dismiss my line of thought:
I want to use JS Objects like one that manages a hierarquical set of combos (One for State, the next one for County).
As I understand: I might use my regular HTML and include handlebars as a script and then manage my data from inside my page.
But I don't want to do so, but manage my data from Node JS and then render the complex page (With my libraries)
Is that a valid approach?