Spring Framework Interveiw Questions and Answers: Integrating Struts 2.0 and tiles

Monday, 1 July 2013

Integrating Struts 2.0 and tiles

I am currently evaluating some web frameworks for a pet project and was trying to implement Struts 2 with tiles. Neither the Sturts 2 website, nor the tiles website gave an easy way to integrated Struts 2 and tiles. It took me a while to get them to work together. This post describes a way I figured out how to integrate Struts 2 with tiles. Struts 2 provides a plugin for integrating tiles 2. This plugin is included in the complete bundle (struts-2.x.x.x-all.zip). The following are are the steps needed to integrate struts2 with tiles.
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Download the struts complete bundle from the struts 2 website
Download tiles 2 from tiles 2 website
Download the tiles dependencies from the jakarta commons site
- Commons BeanUtils 1.7.0 or above
- Commons Digester 1.8 or above
- Commons Logging 1.1 or above

Create the layout page, and related files (except the layout, all the other files are basic jsps )

<%@ taglib uri="http://tiles.apache.org/tags-tiles" prefix="tiles" %>
<html>
<head>
<title>Insert title here</title>
</head>
<body>
<table width="100%" height="100%">
 <tr height="20%">
  <td colspan="2" align="center" bgcolor="skyblue">
  <tiles:insertAttribute name="header" /></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td bgcolor="cyan" width="75%"><tiles:insertAttribute name="body" /></td>
 </tr>
 <tr height="20%">
  <td colspan="2" align="center" bgcolor="skyblue"><tiles:insertAttribute name="footer" /></td>
 </tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

Create the HelloWorld Action class

package example;

import com.opensymphony.xwork2.ActionSupport;

public class HelloWorld extends ActionSupport {

 public String execute() throws Exception {
  System.out.println("Hello World");
  return SUCCESS;
 }
}

Configure the Web Deployment descriptor by adding a tiles listener to the web.xml file of your web application.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
 xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
 id="WebApp_ID" version="2.5">
 <display-name>tilesTest</display-name>
 <listener>
  <listener-class>
   org.apache.struts2.tiles.StrutsTilesListener
  </listener-class>
 </listener>
 <filter>
  <filter-name>struts2</filter-name>
  <filter-class>
   org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.FilterDispatcher
  </filter-class>
 </filter>
 <filter-mapping>
  <filter-name>struts2</filter-name>
  <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
 </filter-mapping>
 <welcome-file-list>
  <welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
 </welcome-file-list>
</web-app>

Configure struts to work with tiles, this can be done by either
1. Extending the sturts package from "tiles-default"
```
<package name="tilesTest" extends="tiles-default">
```
2. Declaring a new "result-type", tiles, that will map to "org.apache.struts2.views.tiles.TilesResult"
```
<result-types>
<result-type name="tiles" class="org.apache.struts2.views.tiles.TilesResult" />
</result-types>
```

Set the type of the results in the package to "tiles"

<result name="success" type="tiles">helloworld.home</result>

struts.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE struts PUBLIC
 "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 2.0//EN"
 "http://struts.apache.org/dtds/struts-2.0.dtd">

<struts>
 <package name="tilesTest" extends="struts-default">
  <result-types>
   <result-type name="tiles" class="org.apache.struts2.views.tiles.TilesResult" />
  </result-types>
  <action name="helloWorld" class="example.HelloWorld">
   <result name="success" type="tiles">helloworld.home</result>
  </action>
 </package>
</struts>

Note that the result "helloword.home" must match the definition name in tiles.xml file.

Create definitions for tiles in WEB-INF/tiles.xml file.

<!DOCTYPE tiles-definitions PUBLIC
    "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Tiles Configuration 2.0//EN"
    "http://tiles.apache.org/dtds/tiles-config_2_0.dtd">
<tiles-definitions>
 <definition name="helloworld.home" template="/layouts/layout.jsp">
  <put-attribute name="header" value="/layouts/header.jsp" />
  <put-attribute name="body" value="/index.html" />
  <put-attribute name="footer" value="/layouts/footer.jsp" />
 </definition>
</tiles-definitions>

The following is a list of jar files used for this example (copied to the WEB-INF/lib directory)
- commons-beanutils.jar
- commons-digester-1.8.jar
- commons-logging-1.1.1.jar
- freemarker-2.3.8.jar
- ognl-2.6.11.jar
- struts2-core-2.0.11.1.jar
- struts2-tiles-plugin-2.0.11.1.jar
- tiles-api-2.0.5.jar
- tiles-core-2.0.5.jar
- tiles-jsp-2.0.5.jar
- xwork-2.0.4.jar
This example was implemented on tomcat 6.0.16, with Java 5 update 11

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Monday, 1 July 2013

Integrating Struts 2.0 and tiles

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