Handlebars helpers for parsing object types for YUIDocs templates

typeHelpers

var NATIVES = {
  'Array': 1,
  'Boolean': 1,
  'Date': 1,
  'decodeURI': 1,
  'decodeURIComponent': 1,
  'encodeURI': 1,
  'encodeURIComponent': 1,
  'eval': 1,
  'Error': 1,
  'EvalError': 1,
  'Function': 1,
  'Infinity': 1,
  'isFinite': 1,
  'isNaN': 1,
  'Math': 1,
  'NaN': 1,
  'null': 1,
  'Number': 1,
  'Object': 1,
  'parseFloat': 1,
  'parseInt': 1,
  'RangeError': 1,
  'ReferenceError': 1,
  'RegExp': 1,
  'String': 1,
  'SyntaxError': 1,
  'TypeError': 1,
  'undefined': 1,
  'URIError': 1,
  'HTMLElement': 'https:/' + '/developer.mozilla.org/en/Document_Object_Model_(DOM)/{type}',
  'HTMLCollection': 'https:/' + '/developer.mozilla.org/en/Document_Object_Model_(DOM)/{type}',
  'DocumentFragment': 'https:/' + '/developer.mozilla.org/en/Document_Object_Model_(DOM)/{type}',
  'HTMLDocument': 'https:/' + '/developer.mozilla.org/en/Document_Object_Model_(DOM)/{type}',
  '*': 'https:/' + '/developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects',
  '$': 'https:/' + '/api.jquery.com/',
  'jQuery': 'https:/' + '/api.jquery.com/'
};

function getTypeLink(type) {
  var nativeTypeLink = NATIVES[type];
  
  if (nativeTypeLink === 1) {
    return 'https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/' + type;
  }
  else if (nativeTypeLink) {
    return nativeTypeLink.replace('{type}', type);
  }
  else {
    // not a native type
    // Link to local class docs
    return '/classes/' + type + '.html';
  }
}
  
var helpers = {
  // eg. 
  //  {{#eachType 'Array.<Number>'}}
  //    <a href="{{link}}">{{type}}</a>
  //  {{/eachType}}
  eachType: function(typeString, options) {
    var typePattern = /(([\w\-]+(\.[\w-]+)+)|\w+|\*)/ig;
    
    return typeString.replace(typePattern, function(type) {
        return options.fn({
          type: type,
          link: getTypeLink(type)
        });
      })
  },
  
  // eg. (will wrap links around all object references)
  //  {{#eachTypeInText 'Some text {Array.<Number>} more text {String} foobar.'}}
  //    <a href="{{link}}">{{type}}</a>
  //  {{/eachTypeInText}}
  eachTypeInText: function(text, options) {
    var objectRefPattern = /(\{.*?\})/gi;       // eg {SomeObject} (anything in brackets)

    return text.replace(objectRefPattern, function(match) {
      var matchWithoutBrackets = match.substr(1, match.length - 2);
      return helpers.eachType(matchWithoutBrackets, options);
    });
  }
}

I put this together while working on a Weather maps and data API library. The documentation for the project includes some custom YUIDoc themes, as well as some funky roll-your-own Handlebars templating using raw data generated from the Y.YUIDoc Nodejs module.

The project will be open-source within the next couple of weeks. If you're interested in taking a look, just let me know. I would love to get some beta testers poking around our code 😄

nice