SiteMesh - Freemarker Decorators

SiteMesh - Freemarker Decorators

As of SiteMesh 2.0.2 Freemarker (.ftl) decorators are supported.

Here is an example of how such a decorator might look like:

<#include "/includes/decorators/header.dec">
    <h2>${title}</h2>
    ${head}
    <img src="${base}/images/logo.gif" border="0">
    <td valign="top" class="body">
        <div class="header">
            <span class="pagetitle">${title}</span>
        </div>
        ${body}
    </td>
<#include "/includes/decorators/footer.dec">

Installation

• Download Freemarker 2.3 (recommended) and copy it into [web-app]/WEB-INF/lib. The SiteMesh distribution comes with freemarker.jar v2.3rc3

   

• Add the following to [web-app]/WEB-INF/web.xml within the <web-app> tag:

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>sitemesh-freemarker</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>com.opensymphony.module.sitemesh.freemarker.FreemarkerDecoratorServlet</servlet-class>
	<init-param>
		<param-name>TemplatePath</param-name>
		<param-value>/</param-value>
	</init-param>
	<init-param>
		<param-name>default_encoding</param-name>
		<param-value>ISO-8859-1</param-value>
	</init-param>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>sitemesh-freemarker</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.dec</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

• Modify decorators.xml to reference a .dec file.

<#include "/includes/decorators/header.dec">
    <h2>${title}</h2>
    ${head}
    <img src="${base}/images/logo.gif" border="0">
    <td valign="top" class="body">
        <div class="header">
            <span class="pagetitle">${title}</span>
        </div>
        ${body}
    </td>
<#include "/includes/decorators/footer.dec">

Context

FreemarkerDecoratorServlet puts some things into the context object that you should be aware of:

Basic context attributes

 

• It makes all request, request parameters, session, and servlet context attributes available to templates through Request, RequestParameters, Session, and Application variables. For example :

  ${Session["user"]}

• The scope variables are also available via automatic scope discovery. That is, writing Application.attrName, Session.attrName, Request.attrName is not mandatory; it's enough to write attrName, and if no such variable was created in the template, it will search the variable in Request, and then in Session, and finally in Application.

  <#assign ww=JspTaglibs["/WEB-INF/webwork.tld"]>

• It creates a variable with name JspTaglibs, that can be used to load JSP taglibs. For example:

  <#assign ww=JspTaglibs["/WEB-INF/webwork.tld"]>
  ...
  <@ww.property value="myVar"/>	

   

  Sitemesh context attributes

  base	request.getContextPath()
  title	Parsed page title (<title>...<title>)
  head	Parsed page head
  body	Parsed page body
  page	SiteMesh's internal Page object