Greetings,
I have been coming back to Java after a long hiatus, learning JSF using
the Core JavaServer Faces 2nd ed by David Geary and Cay Horstmann.
Chapter 8 is "Subviews and Tiles". It is all based on the first Tiles,
and the only tricky part of getting it to work with Tiles2 was getting
the data from the ViewPreparer that was more easily available in the old
Controller.
Anyways, for this chapter and most of the others on the net, it
describes a method of creating re-usable pieces, but they all only
really show one page using the scenario. I'm having a hard time seeing
how it scales to many pages using the same templates. If I have a
scenario where I have many pages with just the content area unique to
each page (but a common header, left nav, and footer), I think the
process I have to do is:
ONCE:
1. Create a generic template JSP, called /template/standardHeader.jsp.
It includes place-holders (tiles:insertAttribute tags) for header,
leftnav, footer, and content.
2. Create a definition called "standardHdr" in tiles-def with
appropriate put-attribute values for header, leftnav, and footer, as
well as a default title (but NOT content).
FOR EACH PAGE is:
1. Add another definition "page1definition" (or page2definition, etc.)
in the tiles-defs.xml that extends standardHdr. To the definition also
I add in the title attribute, and for the content attribute I point to a
page called "/page1content.jsp" (or page2content.jsp, etc.)
2. Create "page1content.jsp" (or page2content.jsp, etc.), which has only
the content.
3. Create "page1.jsp" (or page2.jsp, etc.)
That looks like a lot of overhead for each page I want to add. Am I
doing it wrong? Is there an easier way? Maybe something with just a
single file per new page that says "here's the tiles definition to use"
and "here's the content I want to use"?
I tried to come up with a solution using "Runtime Composition" as
described here:
http://tiles.apache.org/framework/tutorial/advanced/runtime.html
But it didn't work. You can't put JSP/JSF code within a
<tiles:putAttribute>, nor point to it using a facet, etc. As far as I
can tell you HAVE to have a separate file.
I've done a bit of looking through documentation and Googling, but I
haven't found an example yet. Any pointers would be appreciated.
Thanks a lot!
Chris
