Creating a template engine builder

Overview

The TemplateEngineBuilder provides a unified and extensible way to instantiate a template engine of your choice (e.g., Handlebars, Fluid, Scriban, etc.), with optional configuration support.

This enables template rendering abstraction while preserving per-engine flexibility.

How-to

var engine = new TemplateEngineBuilder()
    .UseScriban()
    .Build();

var output = engine.Render(templateSource, model);

Supported Engines

The following engines are available via the builder:

Engine	Method
Handlebars	`.UseHandlebars()`
Fluid	`.UseFluid()`
Scriban	`.UseScriban()`
DotLiquid	`.UseDotLiquid()`
Morestachio	`.UseMorestachio()`
SmartFormat	`.UseSmartFormat()`
StringTemplate	`.UseStringTemplate(...)`

Each returns the builder instance for fluent chaining.

Customizing the engine

To further tailor the behavior of certain engines, such as delimiter styles in StringTemplate, the builder supports optional configuration through customization methods.

Customizing StringTemplate

StringTemplate supports configurable delimiters (either <...> or $...$ ). Use the overload with a lambda to specify this:

// Use angle brackets
var engine = new TemplateEngineBuilder()
    .UseStringTemplate(opt => opt.WithAngleBracketExpressions())
    .Build();

// Or use dollar-sign delimiters
var engine = new TemplateEngineBuilder()
    .UseStringTemplate(opt => opt.WithDollarDelimitedExpressions())
    .Build();

By default, StringTemplate uses <...> delimiters.

Global Configuration

To further customize engine behavior, such as enabling HTML encoding, you can attach a global configuration using .WithConfiguration(...). This configuration is shared across all engines and controls cross-cutting concerns — for example, whether the rendered output should be HTML-encoded.

This is different from engine-specific options, which are only applicable to one particular engine (like delimiter styles for StringTemplate).

var engine = new TemplateEngineBuilder()
    .UseScriban()
    .WithConfiguration(config => config.WithHtmlEncode())
    .Build();

Available options:

Method	Description
`WithHtmlEncode()`	Enables HTML encoding in output
`WithoutHtmlEncode()`	Disables HTML encoding (default)

The resulting ITemplateEngine exposes this configuration via the Configuration property.

Summary

Use TemplateEngineBuilder to select and configure your desired template engine
Most engines require no options
StringTemplate supports delimiter configuration via an optional builder
Global behavior (like HTML encoding) can be configured via WithConfiguration(…)
Once built, the result is an ITemplateEngine instance ready for rendering

Getting Started

Installation

Usage

Features

Parsers