What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

Tuesday December 07, 2004

Runtime inseration of struts tiles in Velocity I've been impressed with TilesTool, it comes in the Velocity Tools package. It runs Velocity views through the struts MVC machine for processing reusable "subviews". However, there's no support for runtime insertion of components!

You can do this in tiles-defs.xml

   <definition name=".dog" extends=".animal.layout">
     <put name="body"    value=".dog.display" /> 
     <put name="head"    value=".dog.head" /> 
   </definition>
   <definition name=".cosmos.head" extends=".head">
     <put name="titleKey" value="dog.title" />
   </definition>
   <definition name=".dog.display" 
     controllerUrl="/dog.do"
     path="/tile/dog.vm"
     />

and so forth. Declaritive tile composition works just fine. But what about programmatic composition at runtime?

With JSTL and struts, I can do this:

<c:forEach var="bit" items="${kibble}">
  <tiles:insert page="/tile/bark.jsp">
    <tiles:put name="bit" beanName="bit" />
  </tiles:insert>
</c:forEach>

I would imagine that the Velocity equivalent would look like this:

<ol>
#foreach ($bit in $kibble)
 $tiles.put("/tile/bark.vm", { "bit" : $bit })
#end
</ol>

but alas, it's not implemented by TilesTool. I can work around this by moving "bark.vm" to its own velocimacro but that it fugly as hell. I would prefer parameterized components.

( Dec 07 2004, 06:53:07 AM PST ) Permalink

links