How to register a helper in Discourse?

Development
1

I’m trying to figure out the best way to register a handlebars helper for my Discourse plugin.

I have an ajax call in my initializer that determines whether the currentUser is part of a particular group. If they are, then they get an extra nav item.

I wanted to do something like this in my hbs file for the nav:

{{#if customHelper}}
//show nav item
{{/if}}

My other theories on how to do this:

  1. Keep the logic in the initializer and use jquery to append the item to the nav.
  2. Create a component for the nav item to only be displayed given the aforementioned logic.

So do you think registering a helper is the best to go, if so how? Or are one of my other approached better.

Thanks for any help or advise!

2

What would customHelper do? Can’t you just do something like this instead?

in your initializer

export default {
  initialize(container) {
    const user = container.lookup('current-user:main');
    Discourse.ajax("/some-url").then(result => user.set("isPartOfParticularGroup", true));
  }
}

and in your .hbs file

{{#if currentUser.isPartOfParticularGroup}}
   // your stuff
{{/if}
3

Wow so simple and works perfectly!

4

Sorry to resurrect this topic, but fits perfectly with my question.

Would it be possible to register a helper without creating a plugin? Like from a script on the theme’s HTML head/body section?

Thanks in advance!

5

You’d typically do that using a theme component, yes.