Spring thymeleaf header and footer dynamic includes

14
votes

I recently started working with thymeleaf template engine in spring. What I want to achieve is - If my controller is this

@RequestMapping(value="/", method=RequestMethod.GET)
public String index() {
    return "homePage";
}

Then I want write HTML code in homePage.html without complete HTML definition like head, title, body etc.

<div>This is home page content</div>

Dont want to write in homePage.html like this. 

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org" >
<head>
    <title>Spring MVC Example</title>
</head>
<body>
    <div th:include="fragments/header::head"></div>
    <div>This is home page content</div>
    <div th:include="fragments/footer::foot"></div>
</body>

I prefer to take head part for header fragment, content from controller and footer from footer fragment.

So in total - How I can achieve this:

/fragment/header.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org" >
<head>
    <title>Spring MVC Example</title>
</head>
<body>

/home.html

<div>This is home page content</div>

(this throw error)

/fragment/footer.html

  </body>
 </html>

Note: I already seen these examples

2
javaspringthymeleaf
Can you paste the error you get when you include footer? - Iwo Kucharski

2 Answers

27
votes

This is how I achieved it.

Step 1: Create default layout file

resources/templates/layouts/default.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head th:replace="fragments/header :: head"></head>
<body>
   <div class="container">
     <div layout:fragment="content"></div>
     <div th:replace="fragments/footer :: footer"></div>
   </div>
</body>
</html>

Step 2: Create your header and footer fragments.

/resources/templates/fragments/header.html

<head th:fragment="head">
  <meta charset="utf-8" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, shrink-to-fit=no" />
  <meta content="ie=edge" http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" />
  <title th:text="${metaTitle} ? ${metaTitle} : 'default title'"></title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" th:href="@{/css/bootstrap.min.css}"/>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/style.css"/>
</head>

/resources/templates/fragments/footer.html

<div class="footer text-center" th:fragment="footer">
  <p> <a href="#"> Terms of Use</a> | <a href="#">What's New</a> | <a href="#">Help</a> </p>
  <!-- javascripts -->
  <script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.2.1.slim.min.js">
</script>
</div>

Step 3: Create your home page

/resources/templates/home.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en"
  xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org"
  xmlns:layout="http://www.ultraq.net.nz/thymeleaf/layout"
  layout:decorator="layouts/default">
 <body>
  <div id="page" layout:fragment="content">
  <div>This is home page content</div>
  </div>
 </body>
</html>

Step 4 (Spring Boot 2): Add dependency to pom.xml

/pom.xml

<dependency>
    <groupId>nz.net.ultraq.thymeleaf</groupId>
    <artifactId>thymeleaf-layout-dialect</artifactId>
</dependency>
25
votes

I solved this like this:

Controller directs to index.html and gives the attribute of the "content page"

@RequestMapping(value={"/"})
   public String root(Locale locale, ModelMap model) {
   model.addAttribute("content", "helloWorldView");     
   return "index";
}

This is my index.html:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head lang="en" th:replace="fragments/header :: header"> </head>
  <body>
  <div class="container">

     <div th:replace="@{'views/' + ${content}} :: ${content}"></div>

  </div>
<div lang="en" th:replace="fragments/footer :: footer"> </div>
</body>
</html>

So i have a folder fragments with header and footer:

fragments/header.html

<head th:fragment="header">
   //css includes etc title
</head>

fragments/footer.html

<div th:fragment="footer">
  //scripts includes
</div>

And in my folder views i got all the views with content views/helloWorldView.html:

<div th:fragment="helloWorldView">
    //Content
</div>