Passing an object to client in node/express + ejs?

In Node.js:

res.render('mytemplate', {data: myobject});

In EJS:

<script type='text/javascript'>
  var rows =<%-JSON.stringify(data)%>
</script>

SECURITY NOTE : Don't use this to render an object with user-supplied data. It would be possible for someone like Little Bobby Tables to include a substring that breaks the JSON string and starts an executable tag or somesuch. For instance, in Node.js this looks pretty innocent...

var data = {"color": client.favorite_color}

but could result in a client-provided script being executed in user's browsers if they enter a color such as:

"titanium </script><script>alert('pwnd!')</script> oxide"

If you need to include user-provided content, please see https://stackoverflow.com/a/37920555/645715 for a better answer using Base64 encoding

That is the expected behavior. Your template engine is trying to create a string from your object which leads to [Object object]. If you really want to pass data like that I think you did the correct thing by stringifying the object.

If you are using templating, then it would be much better to get the values in the template, for example whether user is signed in or not. You can get the send local data using

<script>
    window.user = <%- JSON.stringify(user || null) %>
</script>

From the server side code, you are sending user data.

res.render('profile', {
    user: user.loggedin,
    title: "Title of page"
});

Think there's a much better way when passing an object to the ejs , you dont have to deal with JSON.stringfy and JSON.parse methods, those are a little bit tricky and confusing. Instead you can use the for in loop to travel the keys of your objects, for example:

if you have an object like such hierarchy

{
    "index": {
        "url": "/",
        "path_to_layout": "views/index.ejs",
        "path_to_data": [
            "data/global.json",
            {
                "data/meta.json": "default"
            }
        ]
    },
    "home": {
        "url": "/home",
        "path_to_layout": "views/home/index.ejs",
        "path_to_data": [
            "data/global.json",
            {
                "data/meta.json": "home"
            }
        ]
    },
    "about": {
        "url": "/about",
        "path_to_layout": "views/default.ejs",
        "path_to_data": [
            "data/global.json",
            {
                "data/meta.json": "about"
            }
        ]
    }
}

On the EJS side you can loop yourObject like this;

<% if ( locals.yourObject) { %>
  <% for(key in yourObject) { %>
    <% if(yourObject.hasOwnProperty(key)) { %>
      <div> <a class="pagelist" href="<%= yourObject[key]['subkey'] %>"><%= key %></a></div>
    <% } %>
  <% } %>
<% } %>

For this example [key] can take 'index','home' and 'about' values and subkey can be any of it's children such as 'url','path_to_layout','path_to_data'