Eric Feminella

For some time now, I have primarily been using logic-less templating solutions as they allow for a greater separation of concerns in comparison to many of their logic-based counterparts. By design, the decoupling of logic-less templates imparts greater overall maintainability in that templates become considerably less complex, and therefore, considerably easier to maintain and test.

Handlebars, my preferred logic-less templating engine, simplifies testing even further via it’s elegant Helper API. While Handlebars may not be the fastest templating solution available, I have found it to be the most testable, reusable and thus, maintainable.

Custom Handlebars Helpers

Since Handlebars is a logic-less templating engine, the interpolation of values which require logical operations and/or computed values is facilitated via Helpers. This design is quite nice in that template logic can be tested in isolation from the context in which it is used; i.e. the templates themselves. In addition to the common built-in Block Helpers, custom Helpers can easily be registering in order to encapsulate the logic used by your templates.

Registering Custom Helpers

Registering Custom Helpers is as simple as invoking Handlebars.registerHelper; passing the string name of the helper which is to be registered, followed by a callback which defines the actual helpers implementation.

Consider the following custom Helper example, which, given a string of text, replaces plain-text URLs with anchor tags:

(Gist)

As can be seen in the above example, custom Handlebars Helpers are registered outside the context of the templates in which they are used. This allows us to test our custom Helpers quite easily.

Testing Custom Helpers

Generally, I prefer to abstract testing custom Helpers specifically, and test the actual templates which use the Helpers independently from the Helpers. This allows for greater portability as it promotes reuse in that common custom Helpers (and their associated tests) can then be used across multiple projects, regardless of the templates which use them. While one can test Handlebars implementation code with any testing framework, in this example I will be using Jasmine.

Essentially, testing Custom Helpers is much the same as testing any other method. The only point to be noted is that we first need to reference the helper from the Handlebars.helpers namespace. Ideally this could be avoided as, should the namespace happen to change, so, too, will our tests need to change. That being said, the probability of such a change is unlikely.

Using the above example, in a Jasmine spec, the enhance helper can be referenced as follows:

Then we can test that the helper was registered:

We can then test any expectation. For example, the enhance helper should return a Handlebars.SafeString. We can test this as follows:

The enhance helper is expected to replace plain-text URLs with anchor tags. Before testing this, though, we should first test that it preserves existing markup. In order to test this use-case, we first need to access the return value from our custom Helper, we can do this by referencing the string property of the Handlebars.SafeString returned by our Helper:

Finally, we test that our enhance Helper replaces URLs with anchor tags using the above techniques:

(Gist)

We now have a complete test against our custom Helper, and all is green:

Note: The above Spec Runner is using the very nice jasmine.BootstrapReporter

And that’s all there is to it. You can fork the example at handlebars-helpers-jasmine.