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I'm very new to Apache Velocity, and I'm having a little trouble figuring out the optimal way to structure my templates. In most of the guides I have seen the pages have been built like this:
#parse("header.vm")
<body>
...
</body>
#parse("footer.vm")
I have also seen someone come close to a "main" template with this approach:
<head>
...
</head>
<body>
#if($activeTab=="home")
#parse("home.vm")
#elseif($activeTab=="aboutus")
#parse("aboutus.vm")
...and so on.
</body>
Which seems a little silly, but I guess it works.
I've used Twirl a lot, so I might be spoiled, but I'd like to inject a template into another, essentially ending up with a main template like this:
<head>
...
</head>
<body>
$content
</body>
And then writing every other template as:
#parse(main){
TEMPLATE CONTENT
}
Is this possible in Velocity? If yes, is it bad practice, and if so why? Thanks.
631
asked Sep 10 '14 22:09
Velocity itself doesn't provide good support to layout template (the main template as you called). However they provide a tool called Velocity Layout Servlet (VLS).
To give you a heads up, some other templating solution like Rythm provides very nice template layout management via the template inheritance mechanism (demo). Disclaimer: I am the author of Rythm so I might have some bias here. However you can checkout this article created by a third party to understand the pros and cons of different template solutions.
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