Invoke a function variable

[oscarotero]

Hi. In a Nunjucks template I have some variables that are functions, that I can invoke to get the final value. For example:

{% set pages = getPages() %}

The same code in Liquid throws an error:

{% assign pages = getPages() %}

-> unexpected token ")"

I guess this is not supported in liquidjs. Is there any way to run functions in a template. I think it's a very useful feature.

[harttle]

Hi @oscarotero , we don't use () to call functions in Liquid, the same as in Ruby. Here's a test case:

    const liquid = new Liquid()
    const tpl = `{% assign foo = bar %}foo: {{ foo }}`
    const ctx = { bar: () => 'BAR' }
    const html = await liquid.parseAndRender(tpl, ctx)
    expect(html.trim()).to.equal('foo: BAR')

We added this feature in #222 , it should be available since a very old version. Try it!

[oscarotero]

Ah, thanks @harttle for your reply. I didn't know this feature (too magic to my taste but ok:)

In my real use case, I need to pass arguments to the function. Is that possible?

[harttle]

Not out of the box. Liquid language is not in imperative style like calling a function with func(). But there's workaround as mentioned in https://groups.google.com/g/liquid-templates/c/kK5oTnVLbeU/m/FyJuE25NYqAJ

And there's a mechanism named Drop (not documented much on liquidjs.com but documented on Shopify Liquid), there's a liquidMethodMissing method which can be used to substitute method parameter to some extent.

You can find more info in this PR: #285

[oscarotero]

Thanks for all these references. I'm not sure if that can help because seems that Drop only accept one argument?

To give more context, I want to be able to use this search object inside a liquid template. It's a class with several methods and some of them have 2 or three arguments (query, sort and limit). For example:

{% for page in search.pages("category=javascript", "order title", 10) %}
  ...
{% endfor %}

I'm the maintainer of Lume (a static site generator) and it has a plugin to use Liquidjs as the template engine, but seems like it's not possible to use the helpers like search.