# Rendering HTML

Building API is cool, but sometime, we want to build a simple MVC app that will render HTML.

For this, Danet integrate the Handlebars templating engine.

# Before writing any code

# Create the following directory at your project's root

/views
/views/layouts
/views/partials

Info

If you want to put these directory elsewhere, you can provide the path to views at runtime with app.setViewEngineDir('my/path/to/views);

# Create a default layout called `main.hbs` with the following content:

{{{body}}}

# Let's render things now !

First, let's create your first template called hello.hbs in the views directory. It will print 2 variables passed from your controller.

<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>{{title}}</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    Hello
    {{name}}!
  </body>
</html>

Now, let's tell your controller it has to render this view on a specific route:

@Controller('nice-controller')
class MyController {
  @Render('hello')
  @Get('/')
  renderANiceHTML() {
    return { title: "the page title", name: "world" };
  }
}

We specify the template to use with the @Render() decorator, and the return value of the route handler is passed to the template for rendering.

Notice that the return value is an object with title and name properties, matching title and name placeholders we used in the template.