node.js Express - How to get partial views asynchronously

Question

I've got a layout - navigation menu. In express tutorials theres only old-school pages loading. whole old page is thrown away and a new one is downloaded with all layouts,views and partial views. And i want navigation menu to stay. So how can i do that?

If i'm maybe getting smth wrong with this web pages architecture please guide me.

Answer 1

As @drachenstern said, you want to render only partial HTML fragments, not whole documents including the layout. You can tell express to skip the layout using:

res.render('sometemplate', {layout: false});

If you want to look for Ajax requests as distinct from full-page browser loads, use the req.xhr flag as documented here

Thus you might even be able to do

res.render('sometemplate', {layout: !req.xhr});