Tiles advice

[Juhan Voolaid]

Hi

I am still very new to struts framework, but I already have done some examples and got them working. Because I am still learning, I want to get it done right and one thing that I am not confident about is using tiles. There are several ways in using the tiles, but I want to know what is the best and most general way of using them.

So what I want:
I have a simple page layout and it consists of two things: navigation menu - just links that stays the same and a content area which needs to be updated after every action.
For example it is a simple e-shop web-application on a very early stage. So the navigation has links to: products, serach product and contact and according to content area, it displays: list of products, serach form and contact information.

So how I would do it:
Create a main layout for the page and then for each new content, I extend a main layout and add information about the content area to tiles-defs.xml:

    
<tiles-definitions> 
    <definition name="e-shop.layout" path="/layout/mainLayout.jsp"> 
        <put name="navigation" value="/tiles/navigation.jsp"/> 
        <put name="content"   value=""/> 
    </definition>
 
     <definition name="products" extends="e-shop.layout">
     <put name="content" value="/content/products.jsp"/>
     </definition>
     
     <definition name="search" extends="e-shop.layout">
     <put name="content" value="/content/search-form.jsp"/>
     </definition>
     
     <definition name="contact" extends="e-shop.layout">
     <put name="content" value="/content/contact.jsp"/>
     </definition>
</tiles-definitions>

So then create the jsp files to the "/content" directory, where search-form.jsp and contact.jsp are pages with static information and products.jsp would get its data from database for example.

So for displaying products, I make action class and add action mapping to struts-config.xml:

<struts-config>
<plug-in className="org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesPlugin">
     <set-property
         property="definitions-config"
         value="/WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml"/>
</plug-in>

<action-mappings>
<action path="/products" 
type="juhan.shop.client.web.ProductsAction">
<forward name="show_products" 
path="products" />
</action>
</action-mappings>

<!-- And other global forwards for the static content -->

</struts-config>

And in web.xml there is nothing new:

<servlet>
<servlet-name>controller</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>
org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>config</param-name>
      <param-value>/WEB-INF/struts-config.xml</param-value>
</init-param>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>controller</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.do</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

So the links in navigation.jsp would be like so:

<a href="/products.do">products</a>
<a href="/search.do">searc product</a>
<a href="/contact.do">contact</a>

I don't deal with product searching right now ...


OK, so that would be it. Would that be a reasonable solution?

And here are my doubts:
1. It is very simpel layout, where only content area changes. Do I really have to make a new layout definition to tiles-defs.xml and make global forward to struts-config.xml, when ever there is new action on the web-app or is there some kind of shortcut?

2. To use tiles, all my links on the navigation and perhaps in content area allso have to be processed through struts-config.xml by forwarding it to proper tiles definition. In other words - all the links must be *.do - so I can apply a layout definiton to it?


That is it for now.

[ April 15, 2006: Message edited by: Juhan Voolaid ]
[ April 17, 2006: Message edited by: Juhan Voolaid ]

[Juhan Voolaid]

Up!

[Brent Sterling]

I am not exactly sure what you are asking. Yes, for each page you create a new tile definition entry that specifies what page to use for the content and you create a new action definition. I suspect that there is a way to forward to a tile definition without going through an action, but I have not done it nor had a desire to do it. If you do not need to perform any processing in your action, you can use one of the built in actions.

- Brent

[Juhan Voolaid]

Originally posted by Brent Sterling:
Yes, for each page you create a new tile definition entry that specifies what page to use for the content and you create a new action definition.

If you do not need to perform any processing in your action, you can use one of the built in actions.

- Brent

Thanx for answering, but could you give a small example of that "built in action"?


Another problem is, that my page has option for logging in and I want to use another layout the page user gets logged in. How could I do that?

In my tiles definitions I already have seperate layouts, for example:

     <definition name="e-shop.layout.online" extends="e-shop.layout">
     <put name="navigation" value="/tiles/navigation-online.jsp"/>
     <put name="side_panel"   value="/tiles/shopping_chart.jsp"/>
     </definition>
     
     <definition name="e-shop.layout.offline" extends="e-shop.layout">
     <put name="navigation" value="/tiles/navigation-offline.jsp"/>
     <put name="side_panel"   value="/tiles/eyecandy.jsp"/>
     </definition>
 
     <definition name="products-offline" extends="e-shop.layout.offline">
     <put name="content" value="/content/products-offline.jsp"/>
     </definition>
     
     <definition name="products-online" extends="e-shop.layout.online">
     <put name="content" value="/content/products-online.jsp"/>
     </definition>

The problem is, if I have a link "/products.do", I want that when user is online, the products-online layout is used and if offline, the prodcts-offline layout is used. Could that be done somehow, or I must use different links, to use different actions, like "/products-online.do" and "/products-offline.do", which would not be that cool


Thanx.

[Brent Sterling]

I typically do not use the built in actions...mostly because my actions derived from a base action class that handles some common functionality. Here is the list of non-abstract actions that I see with Struts 1.1: SwitchAction, ForwardAction, and IncludeAction.

It seems possible that you could have your actions return different forwards based on the login status. Say "success-online" and "success-offline". Depending on the difference in the user interface, it might be easier to control the layout in your JSP rather than having different tiles definitions for each page.

- Brent