jTemplates: easy answers to dumb questions

I’ve been trying to use jTemplates for a fairly complex interface that displays quite a bit of data. The documentation on their site is pretty minimal, so I’ve come up with a lot of what may be very dumb questions that I’ve been forced to answer myself, by trial and error (how tacky).

I figured I would post these in hopes of saving someone else some wondering:

1. Can you treat an array like an array once it’s part of your template data?

Yep. In my data, Columns is an array, and this code works great:

<table class="{#if $T.Columns.length == 1}onecolumn{#/if}">
{#if $T.Columns[0].Label != null}
<thead>
...


2. Does whitespace matter?

Apparently not – see above.

3. How do you refer to a property of a parent object from a child template?

I couldn’t figure this out, so I worked around it by adding the property I needed to the root object I was passing into the child. I ended up doing this in a function because neither of the two delimiters jTemplates uses – {} and {#} – can be used for straight assignment as far as I could tell.

{#foreach $T.Columns as c_f}
{#include COLUMN_CELL root=addFieldType($T.c_f,$T.FieldType)}
{#/for}
...
function addFieldType(obj, ft) {
obj.FieldType = ft;
return obj;
}


4. Can I put a property of the current object into my call to a child template?

Seems like no. What I really wanted to do instead of the code above was this, which does not work:

{#foreach $T.Columns as c_f}
{#include COLUMN_CELL[$T.FieldType] root=$T.c_f}
{#/for}
...
{#template COLUMN_CELL[0]}
<td><input type="radio" disabled="disabled"/></td>
{#/template COLUMN_CELL[0]}
{#template COLUMN_CELL[1]}
<td><input type="checkbox" disabled="disabled"/></td>
{#/template COLUMN_CELL[1]}


For now, all I have is those four items.. I’m sure I’ll come up with more as I get into the hard parts.