Finding current url inside EJS view when using express

Question

I'm using Express and EJS to serve pages. I'm using Bootstrap for the UI, specifically the navbar.

I'd like to add an 'active' class to the current page's <li> item, to show the current page. However, I cannot find how to get the URL from within the EJS code rendering the page.

I found 2 workarounds: I used included passing the page name as a parameter in the route's res.render('myview', {pageName: 'myView'}); - which is not scalable and may cause issues.

The other way, was to use jQuery on the client side to add the 'active' class to the item upon page ready - but that means including this piece of script on every view + some useless client side cycles.

Having used several server side rendering languages before, I feel like I'm missing something. And the online EJS documentation is not that great.

Is there any way to find my current path/url from the EJS code?

Update: I took the top 2 suggestions, and passed the view name as a parameter to the view. I really liked @tandrewnichols' idea to calculate it automatically, but ultimately, it was easier to just copy-paste strings :)

Answer 1

In pretty much every node/express templating language I've used (ejs, kiwi, swig, jade), the answer is no. I've always just set a variable called "active" and then checked for it. As you say, it's not a great answer, though I don't know that scalability is the issue. If every url renders it's own view (or even if you have a common handler for view rendering), it shouldn't be that hard to say something like req.active = "Somepage". Another possibility would be to add middleware that does it for you based on the route. Something like

app.use(function(req, res, next){
    req.active = req.path.split('/')[1] // [0] will be empty since routes start with '/'
    next();
});

Then you just make sure any routes that have a corresponding nav component use unique paths, like

app.get('/students', ....)
app.get('/classes', ....)
app.get('/teachers', ....)
// etc.

EDIT: In response to your comment, I always throw ALL my view stuff into one object key inside req, and usually I name the key by whatever templater I'm using. So I would probably actually use the above example to set req.ejs.active and then do

res.render('myview', req.ejs);

This method makes it much easier to separate logic out into multiple middleware functions and not have to pass a huge anonymous object to res.render.

Answer 2

As far as I know, you can't do what you're asking for unless you modify EJS internally. However, a less bothersome solution would be to pass the URL property of the request on each page invocation, rather than define it per route.

app.get('/url', function (req, res) {
  res.render('view', {
    page: req.url,
    nav: {
      'Page 1': '/page1',
      'Page 2': '/page2',
      'Page 3': '/page3'
    }
  });
});

If you only wanted to get the first part of the URL and match it, then you could just call split('/') on req.url. You could then put a loop inside your template file to create the list for your navigation bar.

<% nav.forEach(function(title) { %>
  <% if (nav[title] == page) { %>
    <li class="active">This part of the navigation bar is active.</li>
  <% } else { %>
    <li>This part of the navigation bar is normal.</li>
  <% } %>
<% }) %>