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Building Web Apps with Sinatra

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Getting HTML from a Template

2:19 with Jay McGavren

Ruby strings work okay for responding with short HTML snippets. But they're not going to work so well for full pages. That's why Sinatra has a feature that makes it easy to load text in from files: ERB templates. We can use an ERB template to generate our response to the browser.

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    Ruby strings work okay for testing short HTML snippets. 0:00
    But it's not going to work so well for full pages. 0:04
    That's why Sinatra has a feature that makes it easy to load in text from files 0:07
    ERB templates. 0:11
    ERB stands for Embedded Ruby. 0:13
    It allows you to take a text file such as HTML template that always shows the same 0:15
    static text and embed Ruby code into it that displays changing dynamic data. 0:20
    We'll talk about embedding data into ERB in a bit. 0:26
    For right now we're just going to place some static unchanging HTML into an ERB 0:29
    template file and load that in as the HTML we're going to display. 0:34
    Sinatra loads ERB templates in from of 0:38
    view sub directory within your apps main directory. 0:41
    So let's create that directory now. 0:43
    I'll choose a new folder and name it views. 0:46
    Within that folder, I need to create a file whose name ends in a .erb extension, 0:54
    so I'll choose a new file and 0:59
    name it welcome.erb Then I'll go back into my main app. 1:03
    Remove the HTML string from our route and move it into the welcome.erb file. 1:10
    Making sure to remove the quote marks from the string. 1:16
    I'll save that and then in the route I will call a Sinatra method called erb. 1:19
    The erb method loads a template file from the views directory, renders it and 1:25
    returns the result as a string. 1:29
    Since our template doesn't have any erb tags and 1:31
    the result will be the same HTML string as before. 1:34
    You pass an argument to the erb method with the name of the file you want 1:37
    to render as a symbol and leave in the .erb extension off. 1:41
    So we use a symbol of :welcome and that'll render the welcome.erb file. 1:45
    Since our template doesn't have any erb tags in it, 1:51
    the result will be the same HTML string as before. 1:53
    Let's try it out and see if it still works the same. 1:57
    I'll go to my console, stop my server if it's running and then run it again. 2:00
    Then in the preview, I'll click refresh. 2:06
    We get the same HTML as before. 2:10
    Welcome to our Wiki is a level one heading. 2:12
    But now that our HTML is in a file, 2:14
    it'll be easier to add more code to the template. 2:16

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