Grails Layouts & Sitemesh

transcript

Chicago, October 19 - 22, 2010

Colin Harrington – Object Partners

Sitemesh :: sitemesh.org

whoami

Colin Harrington

Senior Consultant

colin.harrington@gmail.com

colin.harrington@objectpartners.com

When & What

Grails 1.3.5

Groovy 1.7.5

Spring 3.0.3

Servlet 2.5

Sitemesh 2.4 (new to Grails 1.1+)

GSP = Groovy Server Pages

GroovyPage (org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.pages.GroovyPage)

Part of the

GroovyPagesGrailsPlugin

Rich View layer

Taglibs

Page Directives

Expressions

Templates

Grails Layouts

Templating only goes so far...

view + layout

Sitemesh

'It is a HTML templating framework based on the "Decoration" model'

”It is a web-page layout and decoration framework and web application integration framework to aid in creating large sites consisting of many pages for which a consistent look/feel, navigation and layout scheme is required”

~ Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java:_View_Technologies_and_Frameworks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiteMesh

Sitemesh

Orignally Developed in 1999 by Joe Walnes.

Now part of the OpenSymphony Project

Implemented in Java

Can decorate any html so

Compatible with {php, asp, perl, python ...}

http://www.opensymphony.com/sitemesh/

← Layout

Views →

Rendered Result →

web.xml

<filter-name>sitemesh</filter-name>

<filter-class>...GrailsPageFilter</filter-class>

</filter>

(org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.sitemesh.GrailsPageFilter)

sitemesh.xml

<page-parsers>

<parser content-type="text/html"

class="...GrailsHTMLPageParser"/>

<parser

content-type="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1"

<parser content-type="text/html;charset=UTF-8"

</page-parsers>

</sitemesh>

(org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.sitemesh.GrailsHTMLPageParser)

sitemesh.xml

</decorator-mappers></sitemesh>

(org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.sitemesh.GrailsLayoutDecoratorMapper)

Triggering layouts

In order of precedence:

meta.layout static 'layout' property on the controller controller/action conventions:

/layouts/${controller}/${action}.gsp /layouts/${controller}.gsp

configured grails.sitemesh.default.layout /layouts/application.gsp

meta.layout

This triggers grails-app/views/layouts/main.gsp

static layout

Static property on the controller

class BookController { static layout = 'customLayout'

def list = { … } }

This will trigger

grails-app/views/layouts/customLayout.gsp for all of the controller actions in the BookController

(meta.layout has first precedence)

${controller}/${action} convention

Controller & Controller Action Convention

class BookController { def list = { … } }

grails-app/views/layouts/book/list.gspIf not → it looks for:

grails-app/views/layouts/book.gsp

Otherwise it gives up and doesn't decorate the Page

${controller}/${action} convention

Controller & Controller-Action Convention

class BookController { def list = { … } }

grails-app/views/layouts/book/list.gspIf not → it looks for:

grails-app/views/layouts/book.gsp

grails.sitemesh.default.layout

// grails-app/conf/Config.groovygrails.sitemesh.default.layout='myLayoutName'

application.gsp

When all else fails:

grails-app/views/layouts/application.gsp

Basic layout tags

{layoutTitle, layoutHead, layoutBody}

Page properties

View:<html><head> <meta name="layout" content="myLayout" /></head><body onload="alert('hello');">

Page to be decorated</body></html>

Layout (myLayout.gsp):<html><head><g:layoutHead /></head><body onload="${pageProperty(name:'body.onload')}"> <g:layoutBody /></body></html>

<g:pageProperty/>

<g:pageProperty name="page.mainNav"/>

<g:pageProperty name="page.mainNav" default="home"/>

<g:ifPageProperty/>

<g:ifPageProperty name=”showTheContent”>

This content is only displayed if the page property is present

</g:ifPageProperty>

Accessible as a page property

${pageProperty(name: 'page.myParameter')}

Page specific Sidebar...</content>...</body>

Layout:

<meta/>

'meta.propertyName'

<g:pageProperty name="meta.myProp" />

<g:applyLayout/>

<g:applyLayout name="fieldsetWrapper">This goes into the layoutBody of 'fieldsetWrapper' layout

</g:applyLayout>

Thank you!

Grails Layouts & Sitemesh

Technology