Is there a way to render scriban templates without the use of SXA Rendering Variants?

Question

I would like to do some quick prototyping of scriban templates but have found constantly changing the rendering variant and refresh the page to be more time consuming than I would like.

Is there a convenient way to render the templates from code? Perhaps using SPE?

Answer 1

I have found the use of SPE to be great for this kind of thing. Here is an example on how to render a scriban template.

Example: The following uses Sitecore PowerShell Extensions to render a scriban template.

$testTemplate = @"
i_item Title: {{ i_item.title }}
i_page Title: {{ i_page.title }}
"@

$item = Get-Item -Path "master:" -ID "{110D559F-DEA5-42EA-9C1C-8A5DF7E70EF9}"

$pageContext = New-Object Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.PageContext
$pageContext.Item = $item
[Sitecore.Mvc.Common.ContextService]::Get().Push($pageContext) > $null

$instance = [Sitecore.DependencyInjection.ServiceLocator]::ServiceProvider
$scribanRenderer = $instance.GetType().GetMethod('GetService').Invoke($instance, [Sitecore.XA.Foundation.Scriban.Services.IScribanTemplateRenderer])
$scribanTemplate = $scribanRenderer.Parse($testTemplate, "testTemplate")

$renderingParams = New-Object Sitecore.XA.Foundation.Mvc.Models.RenderingWebEditingParams
$templateContext = $scribanRenderer.GetTemplateContext($false, $renderingParams)
$scriptObject = New-Object Scriban.Runtime.ScriptObject
$scriptObject.Add("i_item", $item)
$templateContext.PushGlobal($scriptObject)

$scribanRenderer.Render($scribanTemplate, $templateContext)

Example: The following demonstrates how to sort item titles and generate an unordered list. The ~ was used to get rid of the extra whitespace generated by the template.

Template

{{~ titles = [] ~}}
{{~ for i_child in (sc_query i_page "query:./*[@@templatename='Primary Topic Landing']")
    if ( i_child.Title != "")
        titles = titles | array.add (sc_field i_child 'Title')
    end
end~}}
<ul>
    {{~ for i_child in titles | array.sort ~}}
    <li>{{ i_child }}</li>
    {{~ end ~}}
</ul>

Output

<ul>
    <li>About Us</li>
    <li>Consultation</li>
    <li>Contact Us</li>
    <li>test</li>
    <li>Welcome</li>
</ul>