CODEWITHSUNDEEP
electronejselectron-forge
Franck Dervaux
Franck Dervaux

Reputation: 123

ejs-electron not working with electron-forge

In my electron-forge application, running on Windows 10, the ejs templates are not rendered, although no error is visible. I can reproduce the issue with an application created with 

electron-forge init ejs-test

I am using electron-forge 5.2.2 and ejs-electron 2.03 Here is my index.js file:

import { app, BrowserWindow } from 'electron'

import * as ejse from 'ejs-electron'

// Handle creating/removing shortcuts on Windows when installing/uninstalling.
if (require('electron-squirrel-startup')) { // eslint-disable-line global-require
  app.quit()
}

// Keep a global reference of the window object, if you don't, the window will
// be closed automatically when the JavaScript object is garbage collected.
let mainWindow

const createWindow = () => {
  // Create the browser window.
  mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({
    width: 800,
    height: 600,
  })

  ejse.data('testdata', 'Generated throuh EJS')
  // and load the index.html of the app.
  mainWindow.loadFile(`${__dirname}/index.ejs`)

  // Open the DevTools.
  mainWindow.webContents.openDevTools()

  // Emitted when the window is closed.
  mainWindow.on('closed', () => {
    // Dereference the window object, usually you would store windows
    // in an array if your app supports multi windows, this is the time
    // when you should delete the corresponding element.
    mainWindow = null
  })
}

// This method will be called when Electron has finished
// initialization and is ready to create browser windows.
// Some APIs can only be used after this event occurs.
app.on('ready', createWindow)

// Quit when all windows are closed.
app.on('window-all-closed', () => {
  // On OS X it is common for applications and their menu bar
  // to stay active until the user quits explicitly with Cmd + Q
  if (process.platform !== 'darwin') {
    app.quit()
  }
})

app.on('activate', () => {
  // On OS X it's common to re-create a window in the app when the
  // dock icon is clicked and there are no other windows open.
  if (mainWindow === null) {
    createWindow()
  }
})

And here is my index.ejs file:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title></title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <%= testdata %>
  </body>
</html>

When i run this with npm start

I get no error but the <%= testdata %> is displayed as-is, instead of being substituted. Calling ejse.listening() just before loading my ejs file returns true.

The same code works fine with a non-forge electron app.

Can you help?

Doing some more investigation, I have found out that the critical line in ejs-electron

protocol.interceptBufferProtocol('file', protocolListener)

was returning the following error: Error: The scheme has been intercepted

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1188

Answers (1)

Franck Dervaux
Franck Dervaux

Reputation: 123

This is the same issue as https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-forge/issues/291. Upgrading to electron-forge v6 was too difficult given the current lack of documentation, so I found a workaround.

The reason I needed to use ejs wasto dynamically generate my html code based on a message file in multiple languages. I first tried to generate it dynamically and use loadURL with the 'data:text/html' protocol. However, this creates a lot of issues because the html is not associated with a file path and therefore any reference like

So I turned to generate one html file per language, at build time instead, and chose the one to load depending on the language, at runtime.

So two steps: I added the following to my package.json:

  "scripts": {
    "build" : "node build.js"
  },

and the build.js is:

const ejs = require('ejs')
const fs = require('fs')
let langs = ['en', 'fr']
langs.forEach((lang) => {
  let msgdata = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync(`${__dirname}/src/messages/${lang}.json`, 'utf8'))

  ejs.renderFile(`${__dirname}/src/views/pages/mindmap.ejs`,
    {
      'messages': msgdata,
      'otherlanguage': 'fr',
    },
    {},
    (err, str) => {
      fs.writeFileSync(`${__dirname}/src/mindmap-${lang}.html`, str, 'utf8')
    })
})

Thus, npm run build generates as many html files as I have languages files.

Then my application's index.js file is pretty much boiler-plate electron-forge:

const { app, BrowserWindow, ipcMain } = require('electron')
const ejs = require('ejs')
const fs = require('fs')

// Handle creating/removing shortcuts on Windows when installing/uninstalling.
if (require('electron-squirrel-startup')) { // eslint-disable-line global-require
  app.quit()
}

// Keep a global reference of the window object, if you don't, the window will
// be closed automatically when the JavaScript object is garbage collected.
let mainWindow

const createWindow = () => {
  // Create the browser window.
  mainWindow = new BrowserWindow()

  // and load the index.html of the app.
  mainWindow.loadURL(`file://${__dirname}/mindmap-${lang}.html`)

  // Emitted when the window is closed.
  mainWindow.on('closed', () => {
    // Dereference the window object, usually you would store windows
    // in an array if your app supports multi windows, this is the time
    // when you should delete the corresponding element.
    mainWindow = null
  })
}

// This method will be called when Electron has finished
// initialization and is ready to create browser windows.
// Some APIs can only be used after this event occurs.
app.on('ready', createWindow)

// Quit when all windows are closed.
app.on('window-all-closed', () => {
  // On OS X it is common for applications and their menu bar
  // to stay active until the user quits explicitly with Cmd + Q
  if (process.platform !== 'darwin') {
    app.quit()
  }
})

app.on('activate', () => {
  // On OS X it's common to re-create a window in the app when the
  // dock icon is clicked and there are no other windows open.
  if (mainWindow === null) {
    createWindow()
  }
})

// In this file you can include the rest of your app's specific main process
// code. You can also put them in separate files and import them here.
ipcMain.on('request-messages', (event, arg) => {
  mainWindow.webContents.send('messages', msgdata)
})

Upvotes: 1

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