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How to Set Up Struts Tiles

Here is what I’ve found to be the easiest and fastest way of setting up Struts Tiles for a webapp project that doesn’t already use Struts. (If your webapp already uses Struts, just skip the steps for setting up Struts and add the relevant Tiles parts to your current configuration.) For more information about Struts Tiles, please read my entry about Java Layout Frameworks.

Download the latest Struts binary release (please note that these instructions are for version 1.1).
Extract the contents of the downloaded zip/tar.gz file into a directory within your webapp project, e.g. project/lib. This directory will now contain a directory named something like jakarta-struts-1.1. For simplicity, I have renamed it to jakarta-struts.

Add the following to your Ant build.xml file (or equivalent):

<target name="struts">
	<copy todir="dist/webapp/WEB-INF">
		<fileset dir="lib/jakarta-struts">
			<include name="lib/commons-*.jar" />
			<include name="lib/struts.jar" />
		</fileset>
		<fileset dir="lib/jakarta-struts/lib">
			<include name="struts-*.tld" />
		</fileset>
	</copy>
</target>

Change dist/webapp to the directory where the files to be depolyed (i.e. put into a WAR file) are located.

Add the following to your WEB-INF/web.xml file:

<servlet>
	<servlet-name>action</servlet-name>
	<servlet-class>
		org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet
	</servlet-class>
	<init-param>
		<param-name>config</param-name>
		<param-value>
			/WEB-INF/struts-config.xml
		</param-value>
	</init-param>
	<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<taglib>
	<taglib-uri>
		/tags/struts-tiles
	</taglib-uri>
	<taglib-location>
		/WEB-INF/struts-tiles.tld
	</taglib-location>
</taglib>

Create a file in WEB-INF named struts-config.xml containing the following:

<!DOCTYPE struts-config PUBLIC
  "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 1.2//EN"
  "http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/dtds/struts-config_1_2.dtd">
<struts-config>
	<plug-in className="org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesPlugin">
		<set-property
			property="definitions-config"
			value="/WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml" />
		<set-property
			property="definitions-debug"
			value="2" />
		<set-property
			property="definitions-parser-details"
			value="2" />
		<set-property
			property="definitions-parser-validate"
			value="true" />
	</plug-in>
</struts-config>

Create a file in WEB-INF named tiles-defs.xml containing the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE tiles-definitions PUBLIC
  "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Tiles Configuration 1.1//EN"
  "http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/dtds/tiles-config_1_1.dtd">
<tiles-definitions>
	<definition name="default" path="/layout.jsp">
		<put name="title" value="" type="string" />
		<put name="body" value="" type="string" />
		<!-- Insert more attributes here as
		     appropriate for your site -->
	</definition>
</tiles-definitions>

Here’s a good reference of how to use the Struts Tiles JSP tags and XML elements (the JSP tags and the elements in the tiles-defs.xml file work basically the same way).

That’s pretty much it!

To get you started with using Tiles in your JSP files, here’s an example. Create a file named index.jsp, containing this:

<%@ page pageEncoding="UTF-8"
	contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>
<%@ taglib uri="/tags/struts-tiles" prefix="tiles" %>
<tiles:insert definition="default" flush="true">
	<tiles:put name="title" type="string" value="Home" />
	<tiles:put name="body" value="/index-content.jsp" />
</tiles:insert>

Then create a file named index-content.jsp containing:

<%@ page pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>
<p>These are the body-contents of index.jsp.</p>

Finally, create the file used for putting the layout together, layout.jsp, containing:

<%@ page pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>
<%@ taglib uri="/tags/struts-tiles" prefix="tiles" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-US">
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
			content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Language"
			content="en-US" />
		<title>
			Website
			<tiles:insert attribute="title" />
		</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<tiles:insert attribute="body" />
	</body>
</html>

Now you should be ready to build your project (don’t forget to invoke the struts build-file task) and deploy it to your servlet container. Good luck! If you have any questions or suggestions of how to do this differently, feel free to add a comment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2004 at 12:48 am CEST (May 3rd, 2004 10:48 pm UTC) and is filed under Development, Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “How to Set Up Struts Tiles”

Morgan Molina Says:
September 8th, 2004 at 5:01 am UTC
Hi, my name is Morgan and i am doing a research project about tiles with struts and I’m having a little trouble starting out.
I tried to put in your code but i can’t get it to work.
I am I not doing something right or I am missing something?
Thanks
Greg Says:
October 29th, 2004 at 1:13 am UTC
I am trying to internationalize the title in the browser like IE or Mozilla using tiles. I am familiar with the resource file and have it working just fine in english and spanish using struts without tiles. Now that I am using tiles, I am not finding this specific field easy to internationalize. I have tiles working using the statement. I am use to using in a normal jsp. Any ideas?
Erik Says:
October 29th, 2004 at 7:19 am UTC
The following web page has information regarding internationalization of Tiles.
http://www.lifl.fr/~dumoulin/tiles/doc/tutorialBody.html

I hope it helps.
Sebas Says:
March 16th, 2005 at 3:44 pm UTC
Hi, im trying to set up Struts to use tiles, but just forwarding to the definitions instead of using a jsp is giving me a headacke… do you ahev any extra information on this?
Thanks!

How to Set Up Struts Tiles

4 Responses to “How to Set Up Struts Tiles”

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