Foreign Templating Framework

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Foreign Templating Framework


Employment/Purpose

Here describes how to make a ZUL page to be assembled with Ajax in a foreign templating framework, such as Apache Tiles.

ZK supports many powerful layout components, such as portallayout, borderlayout, tablelayout, columnlayout and so on[1]. It is recommended to use them. Of course, read this chapter only if you prefer to use other templating framework.


  1. For more information, please refer to ZK Component Reference.

DOCTYPE

To use ZK components correctly, the templating page must specify DOCTYPE as follows.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html>
...

Make a ZUL page as a fragment

By default, if a ZUL page is requested by the browser directly, it will generate a complete HTML structure, including HTML, HEAD and BODY tags. On the other hand, if the assembling is done by inclusion (javax.servlet.RequestDispatcher's include), a ZUL page will be generated as a HTML fragment without HTML, HEAD, and BODY. For example, if a ZUL page is included by jsp:include, then it won't generate HTML/HEAD/BODY, such that the following JSP page will be rendered correctly.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<%-- a JSP page --%>
<html>
  <body>
    <jsp:include page="frag.zul"/>
...

In other words, if the result page is assembled when the request is received, you don't need to do anything specially[1]. However, if the assembling is done at the client side by using Ajax to request fragments after loaded, you have to read the following section.


  1. You might take a look at Use ZK in JSP for more information.

Request a ZUL page with Ajax

If the templating assembles the page at the client side by using Ajax to get back each fragment, the ZUL page has to do the following:

  1. Specify <?page complete="true" docType=""?> to disable the generation of HTML/HEAD/BODY and DOCTYPE
  2. Use the native DIV (<n:div xmlns:n="native">) to enclose the whole content.

For example,

<?page complete="true" docType=""?>
  <n:div xmlns:n="native">
  <window title="whatever content you want"/>
  ...
  </n:div>

Version History

Version Date Content
5.0.5 October, 2010 ZUL page is able to be generated as a HTML fragment.



Last Update : 2010/10/15

Copyright © Potix Corporation. This article is licensed under GNU Free Documentation License.