Question

I’m interested in the Tapestry framework put have some problems with it due to several reasons:

The output I have to generate has to be XML. According to http://tapestry.apache.org/content-type-and-markup.html this is no big deal.
But when it comes down to use actionlink, components or all the other Tapestry goodies, the resulting code should not be anchor or div but some custom xml elements/attributes.

Is it possible to archieve this without alot of pain?
Workarounds or insides to the background mechanismn of Tapestry are welcome.

Answer 1

while actionlink will always render as an anchor (a) tag, the Any component can render as any arbitrary xml element, and it and many other tapestry components will render arbitrary (informal) parameters depending on their definition.

for example, (assuming you have a java method called ‘getTheTime’ in your class, mine returns System.currentTimeMillis())

<xyz t:type="actionlink" t:id="someaction">
    a element</xyz>

<xyz t:type="any"
        attribute1="${theTime}"
        attribute2="prop:theTime"
        attribute3="theTime">
    xyz element</xyz>

will render as:

<a href="/app/page.someaction">a element</a>
<xyz attribute1="1338418847753" attribute2="1338418847753"
        attribute3="theTime">xyz element</xyz>

In order to get a combination of the two, you will need to roll your own component. This is pretty simple once you understand tapestry a little better.

Have a look at the source of ActionLink.java (and its super classes) and you should be able to figure it out.