Development Helpers

Handlebars and Ember come with a few helpers that can make developing your templates a bit easier. These helpers make it simple to output variables into your browser's console, or activate the debugger from your templates.

The {{log}} helper makes it easy to output variables or expressions in the current rendering context into your browser's console:

{{log 'Name is:' name}}

The {{log}} helper also accepts primitive types such as strings or numbers.

The {{debugger}} helper provides a handlebars equivalent to JavaScript's debugger keyword. It will halt execution inside the debugger helper and give you the ability to inspect the current rendering context:

{{debugger}}

Just before the helper is invoked two useful variables are defined:

• templateContext The current context that variables are fetched from. This is likely a controller.
• typeOfTemplateContext A string describing what the templateContext is.

For example, if you are wondering why a specific variable isn't displaying in your template, you could use the {{debugger}} helper. When the breakpoint is hit, you can use the templateContext in your console to lookup properties:

> templateContext.get('name')
"Bruce Lee"