Allow for no view engine about kraken-js

[totherik]

Hey @djrenren, you should be able to use the express response directly for that. More here: http://expressjs.com/api.html#res.send. Is that what you're looking to do?

[totherik]

Ah, you don't even want one configured and ignored?

[pvenkatakrishnan]

Like a web server. Cool request. Is there a reason you cant use vanilla express, maybe something else in kraken that you'd like to make use i guess.

[djrenren]

@totherik - Correct, currently my project has to list dustjs-linkedin, dustjs-helpers, and adaro as dependencies otherwise I encounter startup failures. I'd like to get rid of this need.

@pvenkatakrishnan - I really like the lifecycle options as well as the structure for controllers and configuration. It makes working with a team a lot more convenient.

[totherik]

FIxed with PR #61

[poorgeek]

It appears that after the kraken.next (#114) code was merged in that the ability to opt out of a view engine is no longer available. Even the documentation on how to opt out of the view rendering (#72) is missing from the README.

Did this issue regress or maybe there's a better way to handle this now that hasn't been documented?

[totherik]

Hey @poorgeek, actually, unless you use the generator no view engine is configured by default, e.g. when you res.render you get this:

Error: No default engine was specified and no extension was provided.

and with the generator you can simply choose 'None' at the template library question and express will not be configured with a view engine.

Express settings are documented here.

[poorgeek]

@totherik I know this isn't the best place to figure this out, but I'm getting the "No default engine" error even though I've made sure that my generated app has all of the proper configs that are in an app generated with the 1.1.0 generator. I'm also not calling res.render anywhere in the app since I'm using kraken to build out an api which is rendering all of the responses to json. This is why I'm wondering if there's a regression happening.

[totherik]

Interesting. I'm not completely familiar with what the 1.1.0 version of the generator creates by default, but do you have expressView, fileNotFound, and serverError middleware configured in config/app.json? expressView should be a noop if you have nothing enabled, but the error handling middleware assume a renderer, I believe. If you have them can you try removing them? You'll also probably want to remove devtools from config/development.json as it's mainly intended for UI artifacts. Let me know what you find.

[pvenkatakrishnan]

is it possible for us to take a look at it on github somewhere ? I used the latest generator to create a sample without view engines...
I had to remove the res.render from the default controller (which could be pre generated to not do that), but once i changed that, it worked fine.
https://github.com/pvenkatakrishnan/Kraken-NoViewEngine

[pvenkatakrishnan]

I agree there can be a few modifications done when no view engine is selected which i will file as an issue against the generator.

[pvenkatakrishnan]

Looks like there is already one krakenjs/generator-kraken#115

[poorgeek]

@pvenkatakrishnan I actually generated a NoView and a View project (using the generators defaults) and diff'd the two projects just to see what was different. I then diff'd the NoView project with my project and found that we were using an older version of engine-munger (0.1.3) and that we were missing the expressView middleware from our config.json. We are using the devtools, but only in our config/development.json (which was generated), though I'm not testing against that env.

My theory is that when something goes wrong in the code that throws an error condition (404, 500, etc..) that express is still trying to render a view even though its been configured not to display views. So maybe I'm missing a configuration somewhere that should be returning a json response instead.

[pvenkatakrishnan]

ahhh gotcha. Let me generate a 500 error to see what happens....

[pvenkatakrishnan]

You were right, by default the config was still trying to render 500 and 404 views provided within the kraken-js module (which need to be changed in the generator as well). but once i added customized error handling, it worked....
Check this out... https://github.com/pvenkatakrishnan/Kraken-NoViewEngine/blob/master/config/config.json#L29

[jasisk]

Capturing these concerns in krakenjs/generator-kraken#115.

[poorgeek]

@pvenkatakrishnan that got it! Thank you!