To development user
interface,Tiles framework is used. By
assembling the reusable tiles (jsp, html, etc..),tiles is enables the developers to develop web applications.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
Tiles nables the developers to define a template for web site and uses the concept of
reuse and then use this layout to populate the content of the web site.
Steps To Create Tiles Application
To develop of web
application,tiles framework is used. Follow these steps for
adding Tiles to your Struts applications:
At first,add the Tiles Tag
Library Descriptor (TLD) file to web.xml.
Then create the layout JSPs.
After that develop web
pages using layouts.
Then repackage, run and
test the application.
Add the Tiles TLD to web.xml file
Tiles can can be used without or with the Struts.
Before you can use the tiles tags in your application,Following entry is required in web.xml file.
Suppose our web application layout is divided into the four parts called Top Banner, Left Navigation Bar,Content Area and Bottom of the page for copy right information.
The following file is the code of template.jsp:
You can use the appropriate html to define structure for web application and did the following things:
Referenced /WEB-INF/struts-tiles.tld TLD file.
To display the title using the tiles:getAsString tag,use the string parameters. Ignore missing parameter ,if the attribute ignore="true" then Tiles. If this is true in case the parameter is missing then the Tiles framework will through exception .
The tiles:insert tag is used to insert the contents JSP, which inserts any page or web resources that framework refers to as a title. For Example <tiles:insert attribute="header"/> inserts header web page.
Develop the web pages using layouts
In our application,we will use tile layout create a page to display the content page .
There is additional jsp file for inserting the content in Layout for every content page.
So we have to create two jsp files one for displaying the content and another for the content.
In our example we have used two files example.jsp and content.jsp.
The following example is the code for contents.jsp and example.jsp files:
<p align="left"><font color="#000080" size="5">Welcome to the Title
Tutorial</font></p>
<p align="left"><font color="#000080" size="5">This is the content
page</font></p>
The content.jsp is used to define the content of the page.
The content may be static or dynamic depending on requirements.
The code <tiles:insert
page="/tiles/template.jsp" flush="true">
specify the tiles layout page to be used. We
have set the flush attribute to true, this makes
tile file to be written to browser before
the rest of the page. To specify the title of
page <tiles:put name="title"
type="string" value="Welcome" /> is used.
The following code is used to insert actual
pages in the template.:
The content.jsp wil be inserted in the
layout's body region and the bottom.jsp will be
inserted in bottom region.The top.jsp will be
inserted in the layout's header of the region. The
left.jsp will be inserted in layout's menu
region. .
Repackage, run and test application
To test this tile example,add the following code in the index.jsp:
<li>
<html:link
page="/tiles/example.jsp">Tiles
Example</html:link>
<br>
Example of
creating first
tile
application.
</li>
