Sometimes you wish to render Genshi templates in a controller or via a library rather than through the standard @expose() decorator. An example of why you would want to do this is to generate a multi-part e-mail message (e.g., to notify a new user of their account creation).
A recipe follows:
from genshi.output import TextSerializer, HTMLSerializer
from genshi.template import markup
variables = dict(a='var_a', b='var_b') # this is your context variables available to the Genshi template
template = markup.MarkupTemplate(file('/path/to/file')) # reads and parses the template utilizing the XML templating system
# note that you have to call generate twice as "render" "consumes" the generated output stream
textpart = template.generate(**variables).render(TextSerializer) # serializes the generated output to Text
htmlpart = template.generate(**variables).render(HTMLSerializer) # serializes the generated output to HTML
Note that all “text” nodes are reproduced intact, so you may need to tidy up your templates to reduce spurious white space, or do some additional filtering.
And an example which uses the “title” of the HTML template as the subject, and then only serializes the body:
HTMLStream = template.generate(**variables)
subject = HTMLStream.select('head/title').render(TextSerializer).strip()
htmlpart = HTMLStream.select('body').render(HTMLSerializer)
# ... similar for the text output