Enterprise Java

SpringMVC 3 Tiles 2.2.2 Integration Tutorial

Photo of Siva Reddy Siva ReddyJune 10th, 2011Last Updated: October 21st, 2012
10 121 1 minute read
Apache Tiles is a popular and mostly used templating framework for java based web application. Tiles became more popular because Struts 1.x uses Tiles as its default templating framework. SpringMVC which is an MVC framework, like Struts, also supports integration of Tiles as its templating framework.

Let us see how we can integrate SpringMVC and Tiles.

You can download Tiles binaries from here

Step#1: Add the following tiles jars to WEB-INF/lib folder.

  • tiles-api-2.2.2.jar
  • tiles-core-2.2.2.jar
  • tiles-jsp-2.2.2.jar
  • tiles-servlet-2.2.2.jar
  • tiles-template-2.2.2.jar

Step#2: Configure tiles integration in WEB-INF/dispatcher-servlet.xml

<beans>
 
 <bean id="tilesConfigurer" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesConfigurer">
   <property name="definitions">
     <list>
       <value>/WEB-INF/tiles.xml</value>
     </list>
   </property>
 </bean>
 
 <bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.UrlBasedViewResolver">
   <property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesView"/>
 </bean> 
 
</beans>

Step#3: Configure tiles definitions in WEB-INF/tiles.xml

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?-->
 
  
<tiles-definitions>
 
 <definition name="baseLayout" template="/jsp/layout/layout.jsp">
  <put-attribute name="title" value="SivaLabs" />
  <put-attribute name="header" value="/jsp/layout/header.jsp" />
  <put-attribute name="navigation" value="/jsp/layout/navigation.jsp" />
  <put-attribute name="body" value="" />
  <put-attribute name="footer" value="/jsp/layout/footer.jsp" />
 </definition>
  
 <definition name="login" extends="baseLayout">
  <put-attribute name="title" value="SivaLabs : Login" />
  <put-attribute name="navigation" value="" />
  <put-attribute name="body" value="/jsp/login.jsp" />
 </definition>
   
 <definition name="welcome" extends="baseLayout">
  <put-attribute name="title" value="SivaLabs : Welcome" />
  <put-attribute name="body" value="/jsp/welcome.jsp" />
 </definition>
   
</tiles-definitions>

Step#4: Code the layout JSPs

layout.jsp

<%@ taglib uri="http://tiles.apache.org/tags-tiles" prefix="tiles"%>
<html>
<head>
<title><tiles:insertAttribute name="title" ignore="true" /></title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/sivalabs.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
 
<table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse;" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" align="center" width="800">    <tbody><tr>
        <td height="30" colspan="2"><tiles:insertAttribute name="header" /></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td width="150" height="450" valign="top">
 
         <tiles:insertAttribute name="navigation" />
 
        </td>
        <td valign="top" width="650">
 
         <tiles:insertAttribute name="body" />
 
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td height="30" colspan="2">
 
         <tiles:insertAttribute name="footer" />
 
        </td>
    </tr>
</tbody></table></body>
</html>

header.jsp

<h2>SivaLabs : My Experiments On Technology</h2>

footer.jsp

<center>
 <b>© 2011 SivaLabs All Rights Reserved</b>
</center>

navigation.jsp

<p><a href="createUser.do">Create User</a></p><p><a href="listUsers.do">View Users</a></p><p><a href="logout.do">Logout</a></p>

welcome.jsp

<h2>Welcome to SpringMVC+Tiles Sample Application </h2>

Step#5:

WelcomeController.java

package com.sivalabs.web.controllers;
 
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
 
@Controller
public class WelcomeController
{
 @RequestMapping("welcome")
 public String welcome()
 {
  return "welcome";
 }
}

Here the String “welcome” will be resolved as a tile name and display the UI as per “welcome” tile configuration.

Happy coding
Byron
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Photo of Siva Reddy Siva ReddyJune 10th, 2011Last Updated: October 21st, 2012
10 121 1 minute read
Photo of Siva Reddy

Siva Reddy

Katamreddy Siva Prasad is a Senior Software Engineer working in E-Commerce domain. His areas of interest include Object Oriented Design, SOLID Design principles, RESTful WebServices and OpenSource softwares including Spring, MyBatis and Jenkins.
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blessbon
blessbon
12 years ago

Caused by: org.apache.tiles.definition.DefinitionsFactoryException: Cannot load definition URLs
at org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesConfigurer$SpringTilesContainerFactory.getSourceURLs(TilesConfigurer.java:428)
at org.apache.tiles.factory.BasicTilesContainerFactory.createLocaleDefinitionDao(BasicTilesContainerFactory.java:298)
at org.apache.tiles.factory.BasicTilesContainerFactory.createDefinitionsFactory(BasicTilesContainerFactory.java:242)
at org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesConfigurer$SpringTilesContainerFactory.createDefinitionsFactory(TilesConfigurer.java:481)
at org.apache.tiles.factory.BasicTilesContainerFactory.createContainer(BasicTilesContainerFactory.java:104)
at org.apache.tiles.startup.AbstractTilesInitializer.createContainer(AbstractTilesInitializer.java:124)
at org.apache.tiles.startup.AbstractTilesInitializer.initialize(AbstractTilesInitializer.java:70)
at org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesConfigurer.afterPropertiesSet(TilesConfigurer.java:339)
at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.invokeInitMethods(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1514)
at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.initializeBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1452)
… 22 more
Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: ServletContext resource [/
/WEB-INF/tiles.xml
] cannot be resolved to URL because it does not exist
at org.springframework.web.context.support.ServletContextResource.getURL(ServletContextResource.java:154)
at org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.SpringTilesApplicationContextFactory$SpringWildcardServletTilesApplicationContext.getResources(SpringTilesApplicationContextFactory.java:105)
at org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesConfigurer$SpringTilesContainerFactory.getSourceURLs(TilesConfigurer.java:423)
… 31 more

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blessbon
blessbon
12 years ago
Reply to  blessbon

Can someone help… am getting the exception above..

0
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rajan
rajan
10 years ago
Reply to  blessbon

crosscheck location and name of tiles file

0
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Barney
Barney
11 years ago

Hi all! Thanks for the post. It is works for me very well. But How can I display dynamic data in a head/footer? For example I would like to display the user’s unread message number, and some information whick come from the database in the Head tile? It is a bad design that assign in every controller this information, because in every controller I must do that, and this is not manageable! Is there any way for the ReversePresenter Pattern (Like in GoogleWebToolkit – every view known there own presenter, and can ask data from it)? Or how other way… Read more »

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Java Experience
Java Experience
11 years ago

For those getting the above exception regarding tile factory, pls. see if my tutorial on spring 3 mvc and tiles works for you.

0
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Agung Setiawan
Agung Setiawan
11 years ago

In step#3 i found that i had to add this tag

0
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Robert Johnson
Robert Johnson
11 years ago

Please help me out with this error

HTTP Status 404 –

type Status report

message

description The requested resource () is not available.

Apache Tomcat/6.0.32

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Michael De Keyser
Michael De Keyser
11 years ago

Wait… Do you have to add a definition in tiles.xml for EVERY page there is?!

0
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taktouk
taktouk
10 years ago

i have a probleme with tiles
org.apache.tiles.jsp.taglib.NoSuchAttributeException: Attribute ‘header’ not found.
i put the same configuration
plz help !!!!

0
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tapasi pannu
tapasi pannu
9 years ago

Thanks Shiva.
It worked for me only after I commented out following part

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