Express.js View “globals”

Question

I\'m using Express.js (on Node.js) and I know that you can render a view with custom data via the \"locals\" parameter. (res.render(\"template\", { locals: { foo: \"ba

Answer 1

This is a buried response, but I finally got it to work.

1) This is an example around the module connect-flash

2) Add a piece of middleware in server.js/app.js to add req to locals. This allows the template to call request.flash() whenever it needs. Without this, flash() gets consumed on each request/redirect defeating the purpose.

var app = module.exports = express()
  , flash=require('connect-flash');
app.configure(function(){
  ...
  app.use(express.session({ secret: "shhh" }));

  // Start Router
  app.use(flash());
  app.use(function(req, res, next) {
    res.locals.request = req;
    next();
  });

  app.use(app.router);
});

3) Setup your route as normal (this is coffeescript, but nothing special)

app.get '/home', (req, res) ->
  req.flash "info", "this"
  res.render "#{__dirname}/views/index"

4) Call request.flash() when you want the messages. They are consumed on each call, so don't console.log them or they'll be gone :-)

!!!
html
  head
    title= config.appTitle
    include partials/_styles

  body
    include partials/_scripts

    #header
      a(href="/logout") Logout CURRENTUSER
      h2= config.appTitle

    #messages
      - var flash = request.flash()
      each flashType in ['info','warn','error']
        if flash[flashType]
          p.flash(class=flashType)
            = flash[flashType]


    block content
      h1 content here