Backbone.js & Handlebars.js to create a relative URL

Question

In flask, to create a url I use {{ url_for('login') }} in the template (Jinja2) and it returns whatever the url is associated the name login (for example /auth/login/). How do I do this in Handlebars.js and Backbone.js? Is it already implemented?

What I want to achieve: {{#urlfor}}loginRoute{{/urlfor}}
and for that to return: /auth/login.

My routes:

routes: {
    '': 'indexRoute',
    'auth/login': 'loginRoute'
}

Answer 1

I cannot make sense of why you would be wanting to do this. All you would be doing is creating a Handlebars helper for finding and returning the name of a key of some Object that holds some value:

The helper would be simple enough:

Handlebars.registerHelper('urlfor', function (value) {
    for (var key in routes) {
        if (routes.hasOwnProperty(key) && routes[key] === value) {
            return key;
        }
    }
    return null;
});

(This assumes, of course, that the helper has access to routes in its lexical scope.)

You would use this helper in a template in the following way:

<script id="Template" type="text/template">
    <p>The URL for loginRoute is {{urlfor 'loginRoute'}}</p>
</script>

However, it seems to me that it would make more sense to forego the helper and instead do this computation before executing your template function and simply pass the value as a parameter:

template({ loginUrl: getUrlFor('loginRoute') });