The context of “this” in Meteor template event handlers (using Handlebars for templating)

Question

A quick question on the context of the event handlers for templates in Meteor (with Handlebars).

• In the section of Documentation on template instances (http:/

Answer 1

The first parameter in the function is the event. So you could use the target of the event to grab your element.

Template.scores.events({
  'click .click-me': function (event, template) {
    console.log(event.target);
    $(event.target).text("O but I did!");
  }
});

Answer 2

This video explains the concepts:

http://www.eventedmind.com/posts/meteor-spark-data-annotation-and-data-contexts.

The direct answer to your question:

The thisArg inside an event handler should point to a data context. But sometimes the data context is undefined. When you use the Function.prototype.call(thisArg, ...) in JavaScript, if the thisArg is undefined (e.g. a dataContext is undefined) the browser will set this equal to window. So, the docs aren't wrong per se but the event handling code isn't guarding against the possibility of a data context being undefined. I'm guessing that will be fixed in short order.

So, what produces a data context for a template? Normally your root template won't even have a data context. In other words, the Template function is called without an object. But if you use the {{#with block helper or the {{#each iterator, a data context will be created for each item in the list, or in the case of the with helper, the object.

Example:

var context = {};

<template name="withHelper">
  {{#with context}}
    // data context is the context object
  {{/with}}
</template>

var list = [ {name: "one"}, {name: "two"} ];

<template name="list">
  {{#each list}}
    {{ > listItem }} // data context set to the list item object
  {{/each}}
</template>