Spring MVC Webapp: Where to store paths to common images?

Question

I'm building a Spring MVC web application with Tiles/JSP as the view technology. Previously I stored the paths to common images in class Common:

 public final static String IMG_BREADCRUMBS_NEXT = "/shared/images/famfam/bullet_arrow_right.png";

Then I would use this class in jsp to get the image src like

 <img src="<%= Common.IMG_BREADCRUMBS_NEXT %>"/>

I would like to get rid of scriptlets in my jsp code and use jstl etc. instead. What is the best way to store this kind of information? Is it resource bundles? How have you solved this?

kosoant kosoant · Accepted Answer · 2009-05-13T05:55:10

In the end I used Spring's theme support to achieve what I wanted. In my view code I use the <spring:theme code=""/> tag to get the path to image file:

 <img src="<spring:theme code="theme.images.actions.edit.link"/>" />

This tag behaves like any <fmt:message> or <spring:message> tag, but it has its own "message bundles". The necessary configurations in my applicationContext are:

 <!-- 
    ========================================================= 
    Themes
    =========================================================
  -->
<bean id="themeResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.theme.SessionThemeResolver">
    <property name="defaultThemeName" value="themes.default"/>
</bean>
<bean id="themeSource" class="org.springframework.ui.context.support.ResourceBundleThemeSource" />

All themes of my application are stored under /WEB-INF/classes/themes/. The default theme properties are in /WEB-INF/classes/themes/default.properties It looks like this:

 ...
 theme.images.actions.show.link=/@contextPath@/shared/images/famfam/zoom.png
 theme.images.actions.delete.link=/@contextPath@/shared/images/famfam/cross.png
 ...

To change the theme (and icons) of my app I use a ThemeChangeInterceptor (in applicationContext)

<!--
========================================================= 
Theme resolving
=========================================================
--> 
<bean id="themeChangeInterceptor" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.theme.ThemeChangeInterceptor">
    <property name="paramName" value ="theme" />
</bean>

This enables the user to switch the theme via a "&theme=themes.default" or "&theme=themes.alternative" request parameter.

One key part of my setup is the @contextPath@ in the theme properties file. This is replaced during the Ant build process with the correct context path for development/testing/production environment. The key part of my build.xml is:

    <!-- copy all common themes to classes -->
    <copy todir="${build.war}/WEB-INF/classes/themes" overwrite="true" filtering="true">
        <fileset dir="resources/themes" includes="**/*.properties" />
        <filterchain>
           <replacetokens>
                <token key="contextPath" value="${setup.contextPath}"/>
            </replacetokens>
        </filterchain>
    </copy>

I hope this gives you a "running start" on Spring web app themes. In my opinion this setup makes it quite easy to alter the look and feel of an application.

References:

Spring themes: http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/ch16s07.html
FamFam icons: http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
Ant copy task: http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/copy.html

Spring MVC Webapp: Where to store paths to common images?

3 Answers