Freemarker Support

Freemarker views can be rendered using a result type freemarker.

Configure your action to use the freemarker result type

The freemarker result type is defined in struts-default.xml, so normally you just include it, and define your results to use type="freemarker".

<include file="struts-default.xml"/>
...
<action name="test" class="package.Test">
  <result name="success" type="freemarker">/WEB-INF/views/testView.ftl</result>
</action>
...

Property Resolution

Your action properties are automatically resolved - just like in a velocity view.

for example

${name} will result in stack.findValue("name"), which generally results in action.getName() being executed.

A search process is used to resolve the variable, searching the following scopes in order, until a value is found:

• freemarker variables
• value stack
• request attributes
• session attributes
• servlet context attributes

Objects in the Context

The following variables exist in the FreeMarker views:

• req - the current HttpServletRequest
• res - the current HttpServletResponse
• stack - the current OgnlValueStack
• ognl - the OgnlTool instance
  • This class contains useful methods to execute OGNL expressions against arbitary objects, and a method to generate a select list using the <s:select/> pattern. (i.e. taking the name of the list property, a listKey and listValue)
• struts - an instance of StrutsBeanWrapper
• action - the current Struts action
• exception - optional the Exception instance, if the view is a JSP exception or Servlet exception view

FreeMarker configuration with recent releases

To configure the freemarker engine that Struts uses, just add a file freemarker.properties to the classpath. The supported properties are those that the Freemarker Configuration object expects - see the Freemarker documentation for these.

default_encoding=ISO-8859-1
template_update_delay=5
locale=no_NO

Using struts UI tags - or any JSP Tag Library

Freemarker has builtin support for using any JSP taglib. You can use JSP taglibs in FreeMarker even if

• your servlet container has no support for JSP, or
• you didn’t specify the taglib in your web.xml - note how in the example below we refer to the taglib by its webapp-absolute URL, so no configuration in web.xml is needed.

<#assign s=JspTaglibs["/WEB-INF/struts.tld"] />

<@s.form method="'post'" name="'inputform'" action="'save.action'" >
    <@s.hidden name="'id'" />
    <@s.textarea label="'Details'" name="'details'" rows=5 cols=40 />
    <@s.submit value="'Save'" align="center" />
</@s.form>

NOTE: numeric properties for tags MUST be numbers, not strings. as in the rows and cols properties above. if you use cols="40" you will receive an exception. Other than that, the freemarker tag container behaves as you would expect.

Dynamic attributes support

You can specify dynamic attributes with Struts 2 tags like this:

<@s.textfield name="test" dynamicAttributes={"placeholder":"input","foo":"bar"}/>

or like this:

<@s.textfield name="test" placeholder="input" foo="bar"/>

and for both case, it will be parsed into:

<input type="text" name="test" value="" id="test" placeholder="input" foo="bar"/>

You can also use OGNL expressions with dynamic tags like below:

<@s.textfield name="test" placeholder="input" foo="checked: %{bar}"/>

When using attributes with hyphens, use the below syntax (you can also leave the single quotes from false if you want)

<@s.form dynamicAttributes={'data-ajax':'false'}>
  ...
</@s.form>