Home > Guides > Plugin Developers Guide > Portlet Tiles Plugin

Tiles is a templating framework designed to easily allow the creation of web application pages with a consistent look and feel. It can be used for both page decorating and componentization.

Features

  • Supports Tiles in Portlet environment

Usage

The following steps must be taken in order to enable tiles support within your Struts2 Portlet application:

  1. Include the struts-portlet-tiles-plugin as a dependency in your web application. If you are using maven2, the dependency configuration will be similar to:
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.apache.struts</groupId>
      <artifactId>struts2-portlet-tiles-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>${struts2.version}</version>
    </dependency>
    
  2. All package definitions which require tiles support must either extend the struts-portlet-tiles-default package or must register the Tiles Result type definition dedicated for Portlets.
    <result-types>
      <result-type name="tiles" class="org.apache.struts2.views.tiles.PortletTilesResult"/>
    </result-types>
    
  3. and dedicated action to support Tiles in portlet environment
    <action name="tilesDirect" class="org.apache.struts2.portlet.dispatcher.DirectRenderFromEventAction">
        <result type="tiles" name="success">$\{location\}</result>
    </action>
    
  4. Configure your actions to utilize a tiles definition:
    <action name="sample" class="org.apache.struts2.tiles.example.SamplePortletAction" >
      <result name="success" type="tiles">tilesWorks</result>
    </action>
    

Installation

This plugin can be installed by copying the plugin jar into your application's /WEB-INF/lib directory. No other files need to be copied or created.