Spring Freemarker tags in Sitemesh decorators...

[lukasz]

Hi.

I am using Freemarker for Sitemesh decorators. I want to use Spring Freemarker tags (like <@spring.message />) in Sitemesh decorators but I get: "Expression springMacroRequestContext is undefined .... The problematic instruction:
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==> ${springMacroRequestContext.getMessage(code)} ". I also want to know if it is possible to put data model to decorator...

--
Regards,
Å?ukasz

[larry]

The SiteMesh decorator servlet only exposes objects like base and title as described here http://www.opensymphony.com/sitemesh...ecorators.html.

I guess this needs to be fixed in SiteMesh. But you can build your own decorators also.

Spring's own FreeMarkerViewResolver can be configured to expose springMacroRequestContext among other things.

[Andrew Swan]

I too am using SiteMesh to decorate my FreeMarker views. Here's how I worked around the problem:

1. Defined these two Freemarker macros (my macros file is called Macros.ftl, but you could use any name):

<#-- Gets the value of the specified meta tag, or an empty string if it's not set -->
<#macro meta name>
	<#assign key="meta." + name/>
	<#assign value=page.properties[key]?default("")/>${value}</#macro>

<#-- Adds HTML meta tags containing the Strings needed by the layout page -->
<#macro metadata>
    <meta name="some.key" content="${some_FTL_expression}"/>
    <meta name="some.other.key" content="<@spring.message code="some_Message_Code"/>"/>
    <meta name="yet.another.key" content="<@macros someOtherMacro/>"/>
    <#-- other values as needed -->
</#macro>

3. Each of my view templates starts by invoking the "metadata" macro:

<#import "/spring.ftl" as spring />
<#import "/Macros.ftl" as macros />
<@macros.metadata/>
<#-- Rest of template goes here -->

This causes each view to read the values/expressions listed in the "metadata" macro and output them as HTML <meta> tags. In my case, these values are things like locale-sensitive messages, the username, my company name, and the name and version of my application

4. Then in my layout template (the one used by SiteMesh to perform the decoration), I read each of those HTML meta tags where necessary using the first macro, e.g.:

<#import "/Macros.ftl" as macros />
<p><@macros.meta name="some.other.key"/></p>

which at runtime generates the following HTML snippet:

<p>Hello World!</p>

Where "Hello World!" was the resource bundle translation of the "some_Message_Code" message code. The downside of this solution is that I have to edit the "metadata" macro every time I add a new piece of text to the layout template. If you come across a neater solution, please let me know!

[mehmetaydogdu]

Simply copy spring-webmvc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar\org\springframework\web\servlet\ view\freemarker\spring.ftl to the same location of sitemesh ftl file. and use import with backslash before spring.ftl as below
<#import "/spring.ftl" as spring />