I wanted to use the Template class to manually parse my templates and store them in an index database table.

I have the method being triggerd as a custom form action in the backend of my module’s control panel, so the method is not being called directly from the template.

mcp.mymodule.php

function index_template() 
{
/* Template code to parse */
$template_code = '{variable_to_parse}';
/* Load the Template class */
ee()->load->library('template');
/* Parse the template code */a
ee()->template->parse($template_code);
echo $template_code
}

Here are the contents of the template

<h2>Product Listing</h2>
{exp:channel:entries channel="products"}
  {title}
  {product_price}
{/exp:channel:entries}

It doesn’t parse it and just returns a random encoded string back with the template code’s original values

{!-- ra:000000004613792b000000010e895878 --}{variable_to_parse}

If I call this exact same method from a function on my module like {exp:mymodule:index_template} it will work. But only when it’s being called directly from a template/page load.

Is there no way to parse the templates manually even when the method is being passed the template string directly?