Get contents of Meteor template - templates

Question

I have the following Meteor template:
<template name="homeBoxTpl">
<div>
Some content
</div>
</template>
I have an event binding so that when a button on the page is clicked it should get the html contents of the template "homeBoxTpl" - how can this be achieved?

Answer 1

What you need is an event handler, and like Chase say you can access the content of meteor templates using jquery, but meteor has its own way. In order to get a copy of the html, you can place a wrapper round the content in the template, then do this:
Template.homeBoxTpl.events({
'click #someButton':function(e,t){
var templateContents = t.$('.wrapperInTemplate').html();
}
})
Here we are using Template.$ wich returns a jQuery object of those same elements.
Take a look into Template.instances for more information

Answer 2

Just to clarify, where is the button? Is it in another template? I assume you only render homeBoxTpl once.
In which case the event handler for the template where your button exists will have no reference to another template instance. There is no global lookup where you can find all rendered instances of a specific Template
You will have to set an unique identifier "id" for it, or some other discerning info such as a class/attribute and find it via old fashioned JS DOM selectors/traversal.
document.getElementById is fastest, but if there are multiple instances of that template, t.firstNode does give you a good starting point for the DOM traversal.
However making your code dependent on a specific DOM layout is bad practice / too much coupling. Is there any reason why the data underlying that Template's HTML content isn't available somewhere else like a session or collection? It would perhaps be more flexible too to access the data not the HTML.

Answer 3

You can use jquery to access what you need. For example, if you have the following template:
<template name="homeBoxTpl">
<div class="content-container">
Some content
</div>
<button id="btn" type="button">Click me</button>
</template>
Then use the following javascript:
Template.homeBoxTpl.events({
'click #btn': function(e) {
e.preventDefault();
var content = $(".content-container").text();
console.log(content); //Result is "Some content"
}
});