One of the challenges of full-stack development is to call functions in browser-side javascript from server-side code without making a mess. Apostrophe can help here. Apostrophe has features that help you create a single block of clean JavaScript code without escaping problems or a zillion separate script elements.
Apostrophe adds req.pushCall to the Express request object. You call req.pushCall like so:
req.pushCall('something.func(?)', { any: { json: [5, 7] } });
You can do this as many times as you need to, for instance in page loader functions or the index or show method of a snippet subclass.
Apostrophe will automatically spool these out as a single script element, correctly escape all the data and invoke your functions.
Every ? in the pattern (the first argument) is replaced by a correctly JSON-encoded representation of each additional argument. You can use as many ?s as you need.
JSON-encoding is a great way to avoid escaping bugs, but sometimes you do want one of your parameters to be inserted literally, for instance to pass a constructor function name dynamically. To do that, use @ rather than ?:
req.pushCall('@(?)', 'SomeFunction', 'SomeData')
Note that req.pushCall pushes a call to be invoked just in the current HTTP request's response. To make calls that will be included in the calls property for every request, make a call like this:
apos.pushGlobalCall('myblog.setup(?)', options)
Apostrophe's modules use this approach heavily for browser-side initialization.
You can use both ? (escaped via JSON) and @ (inserted literally) as placeholders here too.
A warning
Your JavaScript calls are inserted automatically when a complete page is sent to the user. But if you're just coding an AJAX response that sends an HTML fragment, you'll need to call apos.getCalls(req) and apos.getGlobalCalls() to get two blocks of JavaScript source code ready to insert at the end of the body inside a script element.