Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.

10 YEARS


10 years ago, I wrote my first blog post. Since then, I've authored books, had kids, traveled the world, found Trish and blogged about it all.

How to use Tiles with WebWork

This evening, I created a TilesResult for WebWork that allows you to use Tiles with WebWork. For the following to work in your application, you'll need a nightly build of Tiles, commons-digester (which Tiles requires) and this patch for WebWork. For your convenience, I've posted a patched webwork-2.2.2.jar (with TilesResult).

I also posted a webwork-tiles.war that you can try and download yourself. It's based on Equinox, so you will need to setup PostgreSQL and an "equinox" database - or you can just change the database settings in WEB-INF/lib/jdbc.properties.

On to the instructions:

1. In your web.xml file, you need to add a servlet entry for TilesServlet to load the tiles definitions into the ServletContext.

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>tiles</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.apache.tiles.servlets.TilesServlet</servlet-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>definitions-config</param-name>
            <param-value>/WEB-INF/tiles-config.xml</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>

2. In xwork.xml, use type="tiles" on your <result>.

    <action name="editUser" class="userAction" method="edit">
        <result name="success" type="tiles">userForm</result>
        <result name="input" type="tiles">userList</result>
    </action>

I'm sure WebWork has a way of making this result type the default, I just haven't found it yet.

Hat tip to Spring's TilesView (source) for showing how to make this work.

Update: While I'm a happy SiteMesh user, I've recently had some clients who were more interested in Tiles. This largely inspired me to see if WebWork + Tiles was possible.

Update 2: It looks like TilesResult will be included in WebWork 2.2.2. Now if we could just get the Tiles team to cut a release.

Comments:

You can do this at a per package level or globally for the entire app:

<result-types>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<result-type name="tiles" class="com.opensymphony.webwork.views.tiles.TilesResult" default="true" />
</result-types>

Posted by Eric Hauser on February 16, 2006 at 07:28 AM MST #

What was the motivation behind using Tiles with WebWork. I thought you were a happy Sitemesh user like a lot of us.

Posted by Sanjiv Jivan on February 16, 2006 at 10:50 AM MST #

ugg, nevermind. I missed your previous blog entry.

Posted by Sanjiv Jivan on February 16, 2006 at 10:52 AM MST #

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