Rendering HTML and Templates

look for examples of the things covered in these notes in the repo: the-web-developer-bootcamp /11_express/ejs_demo

Using `res.render()`

allows us to save our html in its own file and pass it to res to be rendered
if we don't want it to send the same exact page every time, we need dynamic html files that are called EJS templates

stands for Embedded Javascript
it lets us embed javascript code inside of templates
use or <%= js content %> or <% js content %> to tell ejs to treat whatever is inside as javascript
- this is regular javascript in this tag, so you can write functions and such too, not just pass variable names --- but don't want to clutter it up
- <%= %> - the value inside the tag will be rendered to the page and added to the html
- <% %> - use for logic/control flow stuff when we don't want to display anything on the page
to send info to the EJS template we use : res.render(fileName.ejs, {templateVariableName : appJsVariableName})
to stop from having to type .ejs at the end of every filename we can tell just tell express they are all ejs files
- use app.set('view engine', 'ejs');
there of lots of other templating languages and systems, but their core functionality is all the same

stylesheets go in public directory
express doesn't know to serve the public directory automatically like it does the views directory
in app.js we need to add app.use(express.static('public'));

basically templates that we can include in other templates
put each partial in its own file
put the files in partials directory within the views directory
include them with <%- include('partialFileName') %>
in the header partial, in the link tag, put a / before the file name app.css so the right source directory is searched
can have partials for anything we need on multiple pages, not just headers and footers --- nav bars, menus, etc