Programming Tutorials

Struts and Tiles - Steps to use Struts and Tiles

By: Grenfel in Struts Tutorials on 2007-09-22  

1. Add TilesRequestProcessor to struts-config.xml
   <controller processorClass="org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesRequestProcessor" />
2. Define the Tiles Plugin
   <plug-in className="org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesPlugin" >
   <set-property property="definitions-config" value="/WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml" />
   <set-property property="moduleAware" value="true"/>
   </plug-in>
3. Create an empty Tiles definition file tiles-defs.xml under /WEB-INF directory
   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
   <!DOCTYPE tiles-definitions PUBLIC
   "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Tiles Configuration 1.1//EN"
   "http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/dtds/tiles-config_1_1.dtd">
   <tiles-definitions>
   </tiles-definitions>
   d) Add the base definition to the tile definition xml
   <definition name="base.definition" path="/Layout.jsp">
   <put name="title" value=""/>
   <put name="header" value="/common/header.jsp" />
   <put name="footer" value="/common/footer.jsp" />
   <put name="body" value="" />
   </definition>
4. Create the definition for each of the three pages by extending the above definition and overriding the empty values
   <definition name="search.page" extends="base.definition">
   <put name="title" value="Customer Search and List"/>
   <put name="body" value="/CustomerSearchList.jsp" />
   </definition>
   <definition name="customer.page" extends="base.definition">
   <put name="title" value="XYZ Co. Please enter your details"/>
   <put name="body" value="/CustomerForm.jsp" />
   </definition>
   <definition name="dberror.page" extends="base.definition">
   <put name="title" value="An error occured"/>
   <put name="body" value="/DatabaseError.jsp" />
   </definition>
5. Change the references to physical jsps in struts-config.xml and replace them with one of the above names. For instance, change all references to "/CustomerForm.jsp" as "customer.page" [No "/" is required with Tiles.]