thymeleaf-mvc

An extension providing Thymeleaf as a view engine in MVC 1.0 (JSR371) environments. It goes beyond a basic ViewEngine implementation, providing access to named CDI beans (a feature labelled "OPTIONAL but highly RECOMMENDED" in the MVC specification) and bridginig Conversion Service calls to registered ParamConverter implementations.

Dependencies

The current implementation is based on the Early Draft (Second Edition) version of the MVC specification. A corresponding MVC implementation must be present at runtime - if the runtime environment does not provide one, include an appropriate library in the application. (The extension was tested using Glassfish Ozark 1.0.0-m02.)

CDI functionality is provided by the thymeleaf-cdi extension; this is a required dependency. JAX-RS integration relies on non-standard interfaces and is thus implementation-specific; currently there is the thymeleaf-jersey extension for use in conjunction with Jersey. This is an optional dependency. These extensions have runtime dependencies as well (any CDI implementation for the former, Jersey as JAX-RS for the latter), but they are required for MVC as well, so they should already be present.

The extension obviously needs Thymeleaf as well. At least Thymeleaf 3 is required - earlier versions lacks lazy variable evaluation necessary for CDI support.

Usage

1. Include the library in your project. For example with Maven:

       <dependency>
           <groupId>hu.inbuss</groupId>
           <artifactId>thymeleaf-mvc</artifactId>
           <version>0.0.9</version>
       </dependency>

   or with Gradle:

   dependencies {
       compile 'hu.inbuss:thymeleaf-mvc:0.0.9'
   }

   These methods pull in thymeleaf-cdi as a transitive dependency. If you're using a way that does not handle transitive dependencies, make sure to include it manually.

2. When using Jersey as the JAX-RS library backing the MVC implementation, consider also including the optional dependency thymeleaf-jersey. For example with Maven:

       <dependency>
           <groupId>hu.inbuss</groupId>
           <artifactId>thymeleaf-jersey</artifactId>
           <version>0.0.9</version>
       </dependency>

   or with Gradle:

   dependencies {
       compile 'hu.inbuss:thymeleaf-jersey:0.0.9'
   }

3. Any necessary initialization for basic usage happens automatically. This includes the supporting components (thymeleaf-cdi and optionally thymeleaf-jersey) as well - you don't have to set them up manually. You are ready to define your controllers and write the view templates.

4. If required, you can customise the template engine by specializing the producer bean hu.inbuss.thymeleaf.mvc.TemplateEngineProducer. For example, you may want to include an additional dialect:

   import hu.inbuss.thymeleaf.mvc.TemplateEngineProducer;
   import javax.enterprise.inject.Produces;
   import javax.enterprise.inject.Specializes;
   import nz.net.ultraq.thymeleaf.LayoutDialect;
   import org.thymeleaf.TemplateEngine;
   
   public class CustomTEP extends TemplateEngineProducer {
       @Override @Specializes @Produces
       public TemplateEngine getTemplateEngine() {
           final TemplateEngine res = super.getTemplateEngine();
           res.addDialect(new LayoutDialect());
           return res;
       }
   }