Tiles Templates

You can integrate Tiles templates - like any other presentation technology - into web applications that use Spring. This section outlines how to do this.

Dependencies

To be able to use Tiles templates, you must add a dependency on Tiles version 3.0.1 or higher and its transitive dependencies to your project.

Configuration

To be able to use Tiles, you must configure it with definition files (for basic information about definitions and other Tiles concepts, see https://tiles.apache.org). In Spring this is done using TilesConfigurer. The following ApplicationContext configuration example shows how to do this:

<bean id="tilesConfigurer" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles3.TilesConfigurer">
    <property name="definitions">
        <list>
            <value>/WEB-INF/defs/general.xml</value>
            <value>/WEB-INF/defs/widgets.xml</value>
            <value>/WEB-INF/defs/administrator.xml</value>
            <value>/WEB-INF/defs/customer.xml</value>
            <value>/WEB-INF/defs/templates.xml</value>
        </list>
    </property>
</bean>

The previous example defined five files containing definitions. All files are located in the WEB-INF/defs directory. When WebApplicationContext is initialized, files are loaded and the definition factory is initialized. The Tiles templates included in the definition files can then be used as views in your Spring web application. To be able to use views, you need to provide a ViewResolver, just like any other view technology in Spring: usually the convenient TilesViewResolver.

You can set Tiles template definitions to specific locales by adding an underscore followed by the locale itself, as shown in the following example:

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

With the previous configuration, tiles_fr_FR.xml is used for queries with fr_FR locales, and tiles.xml is used by default.

UrlBasedViewResolver

The UrlBasedViewResolver creates an instance of the given viewClass for each view it needs to recognize. The following bean defines UrlBasedViewResolver:

<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.UrlBasedViewResolver">
    <property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles3.TilesView"/>
</bean>

SimpleSpringPreparerFactory and SpringBeanPreparerFactory

As an additional feature, Spring also supports two special PreparerFactory implementations for Tiles templates. For more information about how to use ViewPreparer references in Tiles template definition files, see the Tiles documentation.

You can define a SimpleSpringPreparerFactory to automatically discover and bind ViewPreparer instances based on specified preparer classes, using Spring container callbacks, and also using configured BeanPostProcessors in Spring. If Spring annotation context configuration has been enabled, annotations in ViewPreparer classes are automatically detected and applied. Note that this requires the presence of preparer classes in the Tiles template definition files, as is the case with PreparerFactory by default.

You can specify SpringBeanPreparerFactory to operate on given preparer names (instead of classes), retrieving the corresponding Spring bean from the DispatcherServlet application context. In this case, the entire bean creation process is under the control of the Spring application context, allowing for explicit dependency injection configuration, scoped beans, and so on. Note that you need to define one Spring bean definition for each preparer name (as your Tiles template definitions do). The following example shows how to define the SpringBeanPreparerFactory property for the TilesConfigurer bean:

<bean id="tilesConfigurer" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles3.TilesConfigurer">
    <property name="definitions">
        <list>
            <value>/WEB-INF/defs/general.xml</value>
            <value>/WEB-INF/defs/widgets.xml</value>
            <value>/WEB-INF/defs/administrator.xml</value>
            <value>/WEB-INF/defs/customer.xml</value>
            <value>/WEB-INF/defs/templates.xml</value>
        </list>
    </property>
    <!-- resolve preparer names as Spring bean definition names -->
    <property name="preparerFactoryClass"
            value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles3.SpringBeanPreparerFactory"/>
</bean>