A static view in a Spring Web MVC application is a view for which you don't explicitly create a controller class. We saw earlier that the Spring Web MVC application scaffolded by Roo configures static views using the <view-controller> element of Spring's mvc schema. The static views don't have an explicit controller, but behind the scenes Spring's built-in ParameterizableViewController is used for rendering static views. Refer to the Auto-generating Spring MVC controllers and JSPX views from JPA entities recipe for details on pre-configured static views in the Roo generated web application.
In this recipe, we will look at the web mvc install view command of Roo, which creates a static view.
Delete the contents of ch04-recipe sub-directory inside the C:
oo-cookbook directory.
Copy the ch04_web-app.roo script into the ch04-recipe directory.
Execute the ch04_web-app.roo script that creates the flight-app Roo project, sets up Hibernate as the persistence provider, configures MySQL as the database for the application, creates the Flight and FlightDescription JPA entities and defines a many-to-one relationship between the Flight and FlightDescription entities. If you are using a different database than MySQL or your connection settings are different than what is specified in the script, then modify the script accordingly.
Start the Roo shell from the C:
oo-cookbookch04-recipe directory.
Execute the controller all command to create controllers and views corresponding to the JPA entities in the flight-app project, as shown here:
.. roo> controller all --package ~.web
Execute the perform eclipse command to update the project's classpath settings, as shown here:
.. roo> perform eclipse
Now, import the flight-app project into your Eclipse IDE.
To add static views to a Roo-generated web application execute the web mvc install view command, as shown here:
.. roo> web mvc install view --path /static/views --viewName help --title Help Created SRC_MAIN_WEBAPPWEB-INFviewsstaticviews Created SRC_MAIN_WEBAPPWEB-INFviewsstaticviewshelp.jspx Managed SRC_MAIN_WEBAPPWEB-INFi18napplication.properties Managed SRC_MAIN_WEBAPPWEB-INFviewsmenu.jspx Created SRC_MAIN_WEBAPPWEB-INFviewsstaticviewsviews.xml Managed SRC_MAIN_WEBAPPWEB-INFspringwebmvc-config.xml
The following table describes the arguments that the web mvc install view command accepts:
As the output from the web mvc install view command suggests, the following actions are
taken by Spring Roo in response to executing the command:
- Creates a
/static/viewsdirectory inside the/WEB-INF/viewsfolder. Roo uses the value of thepathargument to determine the directory to create. - Creates a
help.jspxfile inside the/WEB-INF/views/static/viewsdirectory. The value of theviewNameargument is used as the name of the JSPX file. - Adds a property with value Help to the
application.properties, that is, the value of thetitleargument is used as the value of the newly added property. The property is used bymenu.jspxto show a Help menu option. The Help menu option allows access to the newly createdhelp.jspxview. - Creates a
/WEB-INF/views/static/views/views.xmltiles definitions XML file, containing a single tiles definition for showing thehelp.jspxview, as shown here:<tiles-definitions> <definition extends="default" name="static/views/help"> <put-attribute name="body" value="/WEB-INF/views/static/views/help.jspx"/> </definition> </tiles-definitions> - Adds a
<view-controller>element to thewebmvc-config.xmlto allow access to thehelp.jspxview without requiring to write a controller, as shown here:<mvc:view-controller path="/static/view/help"/>