First off, I've been off this mailing list for quite a while, so please
excuse me if this has already been discussed (how can I search the mailing
list easily?).
I'm trying to set up a website using Struts' templating functionality,
however I've run into a 'problem'.
Looking at the Struts template example app, it seems to me that the way the
templating engine works negates the point of using Struts in the first
place!
For every page on the site, there is a template JSP page, eg
introduction.jsp, which contains something like:
<%@ taglib uri='/WEB-INF/struts-template.tld' prefix='template' %>
<template:insert template='/chapterTemplate.jsp'>
<template:put name='title' content='Templates' direct='true'/>
<template:put name='header' content='/header.html' />
<template:put name='sidebar' content='/sidebar.jsp' />
<template:put name='content' content='/introduction.html'/>
<template:put name='footer' content='/footer.html' />
</template:insert>
And in struts-config.xml there's no 'introduction.do' action, rather the
introduction.jsp page is referenced directly.
Sure it's easy to change the header, sidebar, footer, but by using this
approach I think we lose a lot of the benefits of Struts. As it stands,
struts-config.xml no longer holds all of my JSP references, so restructuring
the site is very difficult. It would be very nice to be able to completely
eliminate the introduction.jsp page, and instead transfer the header/content
etc definition into struts-config.xml. Is there a way to do this already
that I've overlooked?
If not, what I would like to see is the ability to assign parameters in
struts-config.xml, so we could do something like this:
<global-forwards>
<forward name="chapterTemplate" path="/chapterTemplate.jsp">
</global-forwards>
<global-params>
<param name="header" value="/header.html"/>
<param name="sidebar" value="/sidebar.jsp"/>
<param name="footer" value="/footer.html"/>
</global-params>
<action path="/introduction" type="ChapterTemplateAction">
<param name="title" value="Introduction"/>
<param name="content" value="/introduction.html"/>
</action>
ChapterTemplateAction would perform whatever setup was required, and then
return the global chapterTemplate forward. chapterTemplate.jsp would be
similar to the existing page in the template example app.
It may be that we need parameters like I've specified above (which would be
quite generic and useful for lots of things besides templating I suspect),
and also say a <template name="content" value="/introduction.html"/> tag to
handle the templating side of things.
I've glossed over a few details (such as how the parameters get put into
request scope and passed through to chapterTemplate.jsp), but in principal
at least, what do people think about this?
Regards,
Chris Miller
