Thymeleaf 3 – Get Started Quickly with Thymeleaf 3 and Spring MVC

Rafal BorowiecMay 15th, 2016Last Updated: May 14th, 2016

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Thymeleaf 3 release arrived. The new version brings plenty of new features like HTML5 support as well as Text templates support with no markup – [# th:utext="${thymeleaf.version}" /] , improved inline capabilities – <p>Thymeleaf [[${thymeleaf.version}]] is great!</p>, performence improvements and much more.

The easiest way the get starter with Thymeleaf 3 and Spring MVC is by using Spring MVC 4 Quickstart Maven Archetype. The archetype was updated to support Thymeleaf 3. The changes that are made to the archetype are described below.

Dependencies

The project uses Spring Platform BOM for dependencies management, but it does not yet (as time of writing this post) declare dependency on Thymeleaf 3, so I needed to declare the versions manually.

Thymeleaf:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.thymeleaf</groupId>
    <artifactId>thymeleaf</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.0.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

Thymeleaf Spring 4:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.thymeleaf</groupId>
    <artifactId>thymeleaf-spring4</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.0.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

Thymeleaf Spring Security 4:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.thymeleaf.extras</groupId>
    <artifactId>thymeleaf-extras-springsecurity4</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.0.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

The application generated with the archetype uses Java 8 Time Dialect and since Thymeleaf API changed, the dialect dependency must be updated too. Before it is available in Maven Central, we must add snapshot repository to POM:

<repository>
    <id>sonatype-nexus-snapshots</id>
    <name>Sonatype Nexus Snapshots</name>
    <url>https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots</url>
    <snapshots>
        <enabled>true</enabled>
    </snapshots>
</repository>

And then declare the dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.thymeleaf.extras</groupId>
    <artifactId>thymeleaf-extras-java8time</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

Configuration changes

Template resolver

Template resolver before:

@Bean
public TemplateResolver templateResolver() {
   TemplateResolver resolver = new ServletContextTemplateResolver();
   resolver.setPrefix(VIEWS);
   resolver.setSuffix(".html");
   resolver.setTemplateMode("HTML5");
   resolver.setCacheable(false);
   return resolver;
}

Template resolver after:

@Bean
public ITemplateResolver templateResolver() {
    SpringResourceTemplateResolver resolver = new SpringResourceTemplateResolver();
    resolver.setPrefix(VIEWS);
    resolver.setSuffix(".html");
    resolver.setTemplateMode(TemplateMode.HTML);
    resolver.setCacheable(false);
    return resolver;
}

Template Engine

@Bean
public SpringTemplateEngine templateEngine() {
    SpringTemplateEngine templateEngine = new SpringTemplateEngine();
    templateEngine.setTemplateResolver(templateResolver());
    templateEngine.addDialect(new SpringSecurityDialect());
    templateEngine.addDialect(new Java8TimeDialect());
    return templateEngine;
}

View Resolver:

@Bean
public ViewResolver viewResolver() {
    ThymeleafViewResolver thymeleafViewResolver = new ThymeleafViewResolver();
    thymeleafViewResolver.setTemplateEngine(templateEngine());
    thymeleafViewResolver.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
    return thymeleafViewResolver;
}