Views¶

Of course, it's not practical to return entire HTML documents as strings directly from your routes and controllers. Views provide a convenient way to place all of your HTML in separate files. arvel renders views with Jinja2: a handler names a template, hands it some data, and gets back an HTML response. (Building a JSON API or a SPA instead? Return models/resources from your handlers — see API Resources — and reach for views only for the HTML your app still serves.)

This page covers returning views and passing them data; the template language itself — control structures, inheritance, components, and the available global functions — is covered in Templates.

Creating & rendering views¶

A view lives under resources/views/ as a .html template. Render one with the view() helper, which maps a dotted name to a file:

from arvel import Route, view

async def home(request):
    return await view("pages.home", {"title": "Home"}).to_response()

Route.get("/", home, name="home")

view(name, data) maps pages.home → resources/views/pages/home.html and returns a View. view() itself is synchronous (it builds the View); the render is async:

await view("pages.home", data).to_response()   # → an HTML Response
await view("pages.home", data).render()        # → the raw rendered string

Passing data to views¶

Pass a dict as the second argument; every key becomes a variable in the template:

await view("pages.profile", {"user": user, "posts": posts}).to_response()

<h1>{{ user.name }}</h1>
{% for post in posts %}<article>{{ post.title }}</article>{% endfor %}

Sharing data with all views¶

Occasionally you need to share data with every view your app renders — a site name, the current navigation. Register it once (typically from a service provider's boot) with View.share:

app.make("view").share(app_name="Arvel", year=2026)

Shared values are available in every template alongside the built-in global functions (route, auth, asset, csrf_field, …). For per-request shared data (flashed errors and old input), the web group handles that for you — see Validation and Session.

Package views & namespaces¶

A package ships its own templates under a namespace, addressed as namespace::template:

app.make("view").add_namespace("billing", "/path/to/billing/views")
await view("billing::invoice", {"total": total}).to_response()

See also¶

• Templates — the template language: inheritance, control structures, globals, forms.
• Frontend / Asset Bundling — Vite assets and Inertia SPAs.
• Routing — Route.view(...) renders a view with no controller.
• Session — flashed errors and old() input on a redirect-back.