Access to assets from template

[McNetic]

As far as I can see, there is currently not a general way to get access to a list of available assets or check for existence of a specific asset (for example an image) from the templates. I think it is not in the scope of the templating engine to provide such mechanism, as in a webserver environment, models and variables are provided by the web server to the templates, but in a static site generator, it should be the responsibility of the site generator to provide it.

[jonbullock]

Would access to a collection of file references (i.e. the assets crawled) be sufficient? As this should be fairly straight forward to expose to the template engines via the data model.

[manikmagar]

Extending to what @jonbullock said, Should that be a list of every non-content files discovered by the engine? For example, asset collection to use similar to alltags data model that contains list of tag string names. The collection may just contain a relative path of an discovered asset like [/resources/img/abc.png, /resource/css/abc.css]. Templates can then check if path exists in the collection.

[ancho]

Hmm. It should be possible to bind an object to the model. So that we could use something like

meta.getAssets()
meta.findAssetByName('monkey.jpg')
meta.getCurrentTime()
etc.

[jonbullock]

I like the idea of an object API being exposed, saves the end users from re-implementing the same logic over and over in the template engines.