imajus / meteor-helpers-core

Utility Blaze helpers methods

Installing

meteor add imajus:helpers-core

Purpose

This Meteor package provides Template.helpers method which takes an object as the only argument. It simply iterates trought the object properties and calls Template.registerHelper(key, wrapper<value>) where wrapper is a function which transforms helper aruments before passing to helper function.

Original Template.registerHelper appended object with hash property as the last item to the helper function arguments. The wrapper removes that last argument, extracts hash value and if it's not empty, appends to the helper arguments.

So, to demonstrate how it works see the following helper example.

JavaScript:

// Old way
Template.registerHelper('something', (...args) => console.dir(args));
// New way
Template.helpers({
  something(...args) {
    console.dir(args);
  },
});

HTML:

{{something 'greetings'}}
{{something 'hello' name='john'}}

With original Template.registerHelper the following console output is expected:

['greetings', { hash: {} }]
['hello', { hash: { name: 'john' } }]

Using Template.helpers, the output will be as following:

['greetings']
['hello', { name: 'john' }]

I still don't get it

Simply put, the main purpose of the wrapper is to eliminate using _.isObject(_.last(args)) in the beginning of each helper function which relies on using optional hashes.

Additionaly it provides handy Template.helpers method for registering global helpers in batch.