Spring + SiteMesh + Velocity?

[chrisrbailey]

First, if this has been covered somewhere, please point me in the right direction, if not...

I have a project where I want to use Spring (and Spring MVC), SiteMesh, and Velocity. This is actually an "AppFuse" project in case folks are familiar with that. I'm seeking input on the best way to configure things so that I can use the Spring Velocity macros (such as #springMessage) from within my decorator, as well as any other Velocity pages. Currently the problem I'm having has to do with only the files that go through the DispatcherServlet getting those macros and the request context exposed (which makes sense, but Matt/AppFuse suggested I check here to see if there's a way to expose them to all.

Furthermore, I'm looking for any and all info related to Spring+SiteMesh+Velocity configurations (I'm also using Acegi security). I feel I have it partly working, and the Spring docs, as well as Raible's "Spring Live" book cover the configuration, but I have had some problems, so am just generally looking for any other samples or resources on the topic.

[robh]

Chris,

You can configure macros for any Velocity runtime by putting the following line in your velocity.properties:

velocimacro.library=myMacros.vm

Where myMacros.vm is the path to the file containing the macros definitions.

Rob

[chrisrbailey]

Chris,

You can configure macros for any Velocity runtime by putting the following line in your velocity.properties:

velocimacro.library=myMacros.vm

Where myMacros.vm is the path to the file containing the macros definitions.

Rob

So, sorry to be dense, but I assume this then implies that I need to configure Velocity externally in addition to doing it via Spring? Or, will setting this via Spring inject it in general into my Velocity configuration? I'm currently simply using the VelocityConfigurer with a resourceLoaderPath in my Spring bean definitions, I do not use a velocity.properties file. However, it appears from digging into this class (or rather VelocityEngineFactory) that I can set properties via a "velocityProperties" property in my bean definitions, and I could set "velocimacro.library" here? However, assuming I'm going for the spring.vm macro library, which is bundled up in spring.jar, will I need to extract that out?

[irbouho]

Ben Alex wrote an excellent article on SiteMesh wiki that discuss SiteMesh Integration with Spring.
HTH