Question

Does anyone know how to use a custom ThemeSource in spring? I have seen many examples on how to use themes with property files using ResourceBundleThemeSource. Yet I have seen nothing on how to use hibernate to store vairous properties (such as a single css property) , read the properties with a custom ThemeSource and still be able to use the spring theme tags in the jsp.

I know I can create a controller and fetch these properties from the database with hibernate but I am more interested on knowing how to do this with Spring’s ThemeSource implementation.

If anyone has any ideas or examples I’d appreciate it.

Thanks

Answer 1

To use themes in your web application, you must set up an implementation of the org.springframework.ui.context.ThemeSource interface. To use a custom ThemeSource implementation you can register a bean in the application context with the reserved name themeSource. The web application context automatically detects a bean with that name and uses it.

Here is the ThemeSource interface:

package org.springframework.ui.context;

public interface ThemeSource {
    Theme getTheme(String themeName);
}

The only dark horse here is a Theme type, which in fact is nothing more than:

package org.springframework.ui.context;

public interface Theme {
    String getName();
    MessageSource getMessageSource();
}

And in fact there is already a convenience implementation of Theme type from Spring => SimpleTheme

Notice that ThemeSource expects a Spring’s MessageSource, which means that theme attributes that are stored in a database, in your case, would need to be “converted” to be used with a MessageSource interface.

You can either write your own DatabaseDrivenMessageSource, or just take it from here

Now, having all these variables in place, here is a custom DatabaseThemeSource ( that will become a themeSource bean ):

public class DatabaseThemeSource implements ThemeSource {

    private YourThemeDao themeDao;

    public Theme getTheme( String themeName ) {

        if (themeName == null) { return null; }

        MessageSource messageSource = new DatabaseDrivenMessageSource( themeDao );

        theme = new SimpleTheme( themeName, messageSource );

        return theme;
    }

    // init your themeDao
}