Liquid.NET for Developers

Although the Liquid.NET templating language is very close to Shopify Liquid, the Liquid.NET C# code is very different from the Shopify Ruby implementation.

Getting Started

Parsing a template requires a minimum of three things:

1. generate a (LiquidTemplate)[https://github.com/mikebridge/Liquid.NET/blob/master/Liquid.NET/src/LiquidTemplate.cs] object from a string of raw liquid code
2. creating a context (which maintains the state of the parsing, like variables)
3. merging the two together using LiquidTemplate.Render(ctx:ITemplateContext)

// Parse the liquid string into a LiquidTemplate
LiquidTemplate ast = LiquidTemplate.Create("Hello {{ greeting }}");

// Create a context
ITemplateContext ctx = new TemplateContext()
              .DefineLocalVariable("greeting", "World")
              .WithAllFilters();

// Merge the context into the template
String result = template.Render(ctx);

// Show the result
Console.WriteLine(result);

==> 
   "Hello World"

Types

Types in liquid are numeric, boolean, string, collection, hash, date, and the special type range. Any of these can take the value "nil". These are represented with C# classes that implement IExpressionConstant.

liquid	C#
boolean	BooleanValue
numeric	NumericValue
date	DateValue
string	StringValue
collection	ArrayValue
hash	DictionaryValue
range*	GeneratorValue

Ranges are currently only available in a few places---most of the rest of this discussion doesn't apply to them. More on this later.

Arrays and Dictionaries are heterogeneous, so an array can hold a mix of types, and although the keys of a hash are always strings, a value in a dictionary can be of any type.

A numeric has an underlying type, which is int, long, decimal or BigInteger. You can create a NumericValue with the static constructor NumericValue.Create(val). This means that if you create a numeric value with the decimal "3.00", it will render as "3.00". If you do math with two numeric values, it will attempt to use the precision of the most precise value, so an "int" NumericValue times a "decimal" NumericValue will yield a decimal NumericValue.

Filters

See How to Write a Filter for more details.

Tags

See How to Write a Tag or Block for more details.