What is the Dojo 1.6 equivalent of jQuery(html)?

Question

In jQuery, you can easily create DOM nodes from raw HTML. This is especially useful when using templates.

What is the equivalent in Dojo?

(FYI: I'm migrating something from jQuery to Dojo. The raw HTML is generated from Underscore.js templates, and I'd like to avoid throwing them away.)

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[UPDATE: 2012-01-19 7:17pm GMT+8] As per @esailija 's comment, dojo.toDom is indeed the equivalent of jQuery(html) -- unfortunately, it's only been added to Dojo 1.7, while I'm kinda stuck with Dojo 1.6. Updated the question to reflect the version.

Answer 1

I think perhaps what you are looking for is a combination of dojo.place and dojo._toDom (available without the underscore in >=1.7).

The toDom function takes the string and makes it into a DOM element or document fragment.

n = dojo._toDom("<li>foo</li>");             // n is a single DOM node
n = dojo._toDom("foo");                      // n is a DOM text node
n = dojo._toDom("<li>foo</li><li>bar</li>"); // n is a DOM document fragment

The place function also takes a string and a target.

dojo.place("<li>foo</li>", dojo.byId("baz")); // li element is added to 
                                              // element with id "baz"
dojo.place("<li>foo</li>", "baz");            // Same as above.
dojo.place("foo", "baz");                     // Note: Element with id "foo" 
                                              // is placed in element with
                                              // id "baz"
dojo.place(dojo._toDom("foo"), "baz");        // Text node "foo" is placed
                                              // in element with id "baz"

Notice the third example: if the string doesn't start with a <, it's treated as the id of an element somewhere else in the document.

Btw, the dojo.place function also takes a third position argument, which can be "first", "last", "replace", "before", "after" (and probably a few other things).

http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/dojo/place.html

Answer 2

That would be the create method.