Tutorial #2 - Tiles

Quadriga as well as several other of the Java/Spring web applications developed in the Digital Innovation Group use Apache Tiles for managing the layout of the application. This tutorial will you walk through a very basic example of how to implement Apache Tiles with Spring.

This tutorial is based on Tutorial #1.

Configuration

First of all, let's add the Tiles dependencies to our pom.xml file. Inside the dependencies tag, add the following dependency declarations:

Tiles dependencies

<dependency>
	<groupId>org.apache.tiles</groupId>
	<artifactId>tiles-template</artifactId>
	<version>3.0.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
	<groupId>org.apache.tiles</groupId>
	<artifactId>tiles-core</artifactId>
	<version>3.0.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
	<groupId>org.apache.tiles</groupId>
	<artifactId>tiles-api</artifactId>
	<version>3.0.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
	<groupId>org.apache.tiles</groupId>
	<artifactId>tiles-servlet</artifactId>
	<version>3.0.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
	<groupId>org.apache.tiles</groupId>
	<artifactId>tiles-jsp</artifactId>
	<version>3.0.1</version>
</dependency>

Next, open the root-context.xml file in your WEB-INF > spring folder. From there, remove the InternalResourceViewResolver bean declaration and add the following code:

Tiles beans declaration

<beans:bean id="tilesViewResolver" 
	class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.UrlBasedViewResolver" >
	<beans:property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles3.TilesView"/>
</beans:bean>
<beans:bean id="tilesConfigurer" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles3.TilesConfigurer">
    <beans:property name="definitions">
         <beans:list>
             <beans:value>/WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml</beans:value>
         </beans:list>
    </beans:property>
</beans:bean>

Your root-context.xml file should now look like this:

root-context.xml

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"
    xsi:schemaLocation="
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc
http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd">

    <context:component-scan base-package="edu.asu.diging.tutorial.spring" />

    <bean id="tilesViewResolver" 
		class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.UrlBasedViewResolver" >
		<property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles3.TilesView"/>
	</bean>
	<bean id="tilesConfigurer" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles3.TilesConfigurer">
        <property name="definitions">
            <list>
                <value>/WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml</value>
            </list>
        </property>
	</bean>
</beans>

You declared two beans in this piece of XML. First, you specify that you want to use a UrlBasedViewResolver to resolve your views. As a property you give the resolver a TilesView. The second bean, the TilesConfigurer, "simply configures a TilesContainer using a set of files containing definitions, to be accessed by TilesView instances. This is a Spring-based alternative (for usage in Spring configuration) to the Tiles-provided ServletContextListener (e.g. CompleteAutoloadTilesListener for usage in web.xml.)" (Spring TilesConfigurer Javadoc)

Inside the "definitions" property, you specify where Tiles can find the definitions telling it what templates to render.