FAQ: Learn Handlebars - Using Handlebars expressions

#1

Community%20FAQs%20on%20Codecademy%20Exercises

This community-built FAQ covers the “Using Handlebars expressions” exercise from the lesson “Learn Handlebars”.

Paths and Courses
This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Web Development

Building Interactive JavaScript Websites

FAQs on the exercise Using Handlebars expressions

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#2

This question really could apply to most of the Handlebars lesson and the Musicon project. After completing this exercise, I wanted to see if I could play with variations in syntax, but some variants were not successful and I’m not sure why. The first block below is my functional JS code written by following the directions completely:

const source = document.getElementById('greet').innerHTML;
 
const template = Handlebars.compile(source);
 
const context = {
  greeting: 'Hello World!'
}
 
const compiledHtml = template(context);

const fill = document.getElementById('hello');
 
fill.innerHTML = compiledHtml;

Since the variable source references the innerHTML of the ‘greet’ element, I wanted to see if I could move .innerHTML to the fill variable declaration:

const fill = document.getElementById('hello').innerHTML;
 
fill = compiledHtml;

The above code did not work. I can intuit that the variables fill and source are used for different things, but I can’t explain why writing a script like above wouldn’t be functional, nor can I explain why it’s okay to assign the full path to innerHTML of ‘greet’ to source (I did successfully move innerHTML from the source declaration to the compile method argument). I would love to hear an expert explanation. Thanks!

3 Likes
#3

Coming back to this months later, it’s pretty obvious to me now. The parser would interpret my code as reassigning the const variable fill… not allowed. If I ran this with the javascript console up, I’m sure it would throw an error.

#4

Hello, I’m a bit confused with this exercise in Steps 7 & 8. I’m not exactly sure why we need to create the variable fill (where the code reads the following):

const fill = document.getElementById('hello');

fill.innerHTML = compiledHtml;

Edit for clarification: I’m adding in the full code from the exercise below. Here is the HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Hello World!</title>
    <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="public/style.css">
    <script src="handlebars.min.js"></script>
    <!--Create a new script element on the line below-->
  </head>
      <script id='greet' type='text/x-handlebars-template'>
      {{greeting}} We salute you in peace.
      </script>
  <body>
    <div class="container">
      <h1>Handlebar Expressions</h1>
      <div id="hello">
      </div>
      <div class="blinker">|</div>
    </div>  
    <script src="public/main.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
  </body>
</html>

And here is the JS:

const source = document.getElementById('greet').innerHTML;

const template = Handlebars.compile(source);

const context = {
  greeting: 'Hello World!'
};

const compiledHtml = template(context);

const fill = document.getElementById('hello');

fill.innerHTML = compiledHtml;

I noticed in the example provided in the lesson they skip this step (the text just reads):

const source = document.getElementById('foo').innerHTML;

const template = Handlebars.compile(source);

const context = {
  bar: 'Text of the paragraph element'
};

const compiledHtml = template(context);

What is the purpose of fill?