UnderscoreEngineHelper

This CakePHP helper can help you generate some basic Underscore Javascript and can be useful loading a small amount of your Underscore templates without requiring further AJAX requests in order to fetch your templates seperately.

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Loading templates

Organize your templates in a folder under your webroot WWW_ROOT and configure the helper in your view file to look for this folder.

$this->Js->UnderscoreEngine->setTemplateRoot('templates');

Then loadTemplates will scan the configured folder for all files with a .html or .jst extension and will produce a object under window.jst containing all of the templates and their relative paths.

if($templates = $this->Js->UnderscoreEngine->loadTemplates()) {
	echo $this->Html->scriptBlock($templates);
}

Example result:

window.jst = {};
window.jst['test'] = _.template('template content');
window.jst['subfolder/test'] = _.template('template content from a template under a subfolder of WWW_ROOT/templates');

Installation

Drop UnderscoreEngineHelper.php in your application's app/View/Helper folder. Tested for CakePHP 2.3 and above.