Question

I found this in an existing Tiles configuration. Tiles is being used with SpringMVC.
Can someone explain what this does?

Basically it intercepts requests for all views of the form page.* and displays a static jsp page. What I can’t figure out is how? What does {1} do? Does it just replace the content represented by *?

If I want to display a jsp called about.jsp what view should the controller request? page.about.jsp or page.about?

Also, what is layout.page.{1} pointing to? I can’t find a layout folder under my jsp folder.

<!-- Static pages -->
<definition name="page.*" extends="layout.main">
    <put-attribute name="titleKey" value="title.{1}"/>
    <put-attribute name="body" value="layout.page.{1}"/>
</definition>

The Layout definition is as follows:

<definition name="layout.main" template="/WEB-INF/templates/mainLayout.jsp"
            preparer="com.company.modules.web.tiles.ABTestViewPreparer">
    <put-attribute name="titleKey" value="Company Archetypical Webapp"/>
    <put-attribute name="backToResults" value="" />
    <put-attribute name="metaDesc" value="meta.description"/>
    <put-attribute name="metaKeywords" value="meta.keywords"/>
    <put-attribute name="header" value="/WEB-INF/templates/header.jsp"/>
    <put-attribute name="searchBar" value="/WEB-INF/templates/blank.jsp"/>
    <put-attribute name="nav" value="/WEB-INF/templates/blank.jsp"/>
    <put-attribute name="ads" value="/WEB-INF/templates/blank.jsp"/>
    <put-attribute name="body" value="/WEB-INF/templates/blank.jsp" />
    <put-attribute name="footer" value="/WEB-INF/templates/footer.jsp"/>
</definition>

Any help is appreciated, I’m trying to figure it out from the Tiles documentation but it’s just not clear whats going on and I don’t want to hack away unless I know what I’m doing since I may not be able to revert to the original code.

Answer 1

{1} gets replaced by the wildcard value
for example
page.FOO, {1} gets replaced with FOO

So if an action sent a user to page.FOO
titleKey would resolve to whatever title.FOO is in the properties file.