I need to keep a "colcounter" variable inside the loop that will be used to fill a jsrender template.

Here is my template code

  <script id="datascapeTemplate" type="text/x-jsrender">

<div id="dsViewport">

    <div class="ds-column" style="width:{{:(name.length*100)}}px;">
        <h1 id="datascapeName">{{:name}}</h1>
        <div><span id="dsToggle">toggle</span></div>
    </div>
{{=colcounter}}
    {{for sections}}
    <div class="ds-section">

        <h3>{{:label}}</h3>
        <div class="ds-column" id="start">

        {{for items}}

            {{* if (colcounter > 4){ 
                colcounter = 1;
                }} 
        </div>
        <div class="ds-column" id="start">

            {{* } }}

            {{* 
            if ( data.selected || datascape.showInvisible) {  }}     
            <div class="ds-item {{* if (data.featured){ }} nowActive {{*} }} {{* if (data.active){ }} nowActiveRed {{*} }}"  background="{{:background}}" bgcolor="#000000" fgcolor="#FFFFFF">
                <div class="ds-item-container">
                    <h4>{{:title}}<br/>{{:time}}</h4>

                    <p><a item="{{:id}}" href="{{:url}}" class="itemLink">view file {{:colcounter}}</a></p>
                </div>
            </div>

            {{* colcounter++; }}

            {{* } }}

        {{/for}}
        </div>
        {{* colcounter=1; }}
        </div>
    {{/for}}
    {{* colcounter=1; }}
</div>


</script>

Unfortunately, it prints, on the very first iteration of the loop "Error: colcounter is not defined.". Afterwards it works.

It seems the way i initialise my colcounter variable is not working but i fail to find the correct way. var colcounter =0 does not work.

UPDATE

• jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/ZX6Mk/
• colcounter works now. I declared it in the global scope. But I have an issue with datascape.showInvisible. It also triggers the error Error: Cannot read property 'showInvisible' of undefined.

Thank you for your time, a.

• javascript
• jquery
• jsrender

I took your fiddle and made a few changes. http://jsfiddle.net/johnpapa/bLSkz/

1. The toggleButton was being referred to in jQuery without the #. So I added that.List item, otherwise the click was not being captured.
2. Your fiddle did not reference jQuery nor JsRender, though you were using both, so I added them. (I assume you never ran the fiddle)
3. There was no datascape.showInvisible property, so I created one.

4. I passed showInvisible to the inner for loop using a parameter, so it could be accessed in its context.

   {{for sections ~showIt=showInvisible}}
   
   {{if (editorspick_amount > 0 || ~showIt)}}
   

5. The template you were trying to render did not exist, so I changed the rendering code to use the script tag you created. This also sets the allowCode=true, which is required to safely turn on the allowCode feature.

   $.templates("myTmpl", {markup: "#datascapeTemplate", allowCode: true });
   
   $('#toggleButton').click(function(){
       if(!rendered){
           rendered = true;
           $("#datascape").html(
               $.render.myTmpl( datascape.json )
           ).show();
       }
   });
   

6. I changed one place where you used {{* }} to instead use an {{if}} block since there was no need to use allow code.

This allowed all of the code to run and the template to render, though I admittedly did not follow all of what you were trying to do.

Hope this helps.

One suggestion ... the allowCode feature makes for really ugly templates and hard to maintain and read. I highly recommend replacing it with helper functions (or other constructs). For example, you used allowCode to create the styling for some elements. You could have used a custom tag for this instead, and moved the logic to javascript and simplified your template. The colcounter could be moved to a helper function. It's just much more readable to move the logic to javascript, and keep the template/html clean. Just my 2 cents :)