This version is still in development and is not considered stable yet. For the latest stable version, please use Spring Framework 6.1.13! |
This version is still in development and is not considered stable yet. For the latest stable version, please use Spring Framework 6.1.13! |
The use of view technologies in Spring WebFlux is pluggable. Whether you decide to use Thymeleaf, FreeMarker, or some other view technology is primarily a matter of a configuration change. This chapter covers the view technologies integrated with Spring WebFlux. We assume you are already familiar with View Resolution.
Thymeleaf
Thymeleaf is a modern server-side Java template engine that emphasizes natural HTML templates that can be previewed in a browser by double-clicking, which is very helpful for independent work on UI templates (for example, by a designer) without the need for a running server. Thymeleaf offers an extensive set of features, and it is actively developed and maintained. For a more complete introduction, see the Thymeleaf project home page.
The Thymeleaf integration with Spring WebFlux is managed by the Thymeleaf project. The
configuration involves a few bean declarations, such as
SpringResourceTemplateResolver
, SpringWebFluxTemplateEngine
, and
ThymeleafReactiveViewResolver
. For more details, see
Thymeleaf+Spring and the WebFlux integration
announcement.
FreeMarker
Apache FreeMarker is a template engine for generating any kind of text output from HTML to email and others. The Spring Framework has built-in integration for using Spring WebFlux with FreeMarker templates.
View Configuration
The following example shows how to configure FreeMarker as a view technology:
-
Java
-
Kotlin
@Configuration
@EnableWebFlux
public class WebConfig implements WebFluxConfigurer {
@Override
public void configureViewResolvers(ViewResolverRegistry registry) {
registry.freeMarker();
}
// Configure FreeMarker...
@Bean
public FreeMarkerConfigurer freeMarkerConfigurer() {
FreeMarkerConfigurer configurer = new FreeMarkerConfigurer();
configurer.setTemplateLoaderPath("classpath:/templates/freemarker");
return configurer;
}
}
@Configuration
@EnableWebFlux
class WebConfig : WebFluxConfigurer {
override fun configureViewResolvers(registry: ViewResolverRegistry) {
registry.freeMarker()
}
// Configure FreeMarker...
@Bean
fun freeMarkerConfigurer() = FreeMarkerConfigurer().apply {
setTemplateLoaderPath("classpath:/templates/freemarker")
}
}
Your templates need to be stored in the directory specified by the FreeMarkerConfigurer
,
shown in the preceding example. Given the preceding configuration, if your controller
returns the view name, welcome
, the resolver looks for the
classpath:/templates/freemarker/welcome.ftl
template.
FreeMarker Configuration
You can pass FreeMarker 'Settings' and 'SharedVariables' directly to the FreeMarker
Configuration
object (which is managed by Spring) by setting the appropriate bean
properties on the FreeMarkerConfigurer
bean. The freemarkerSettings
property requires
a java.util.Properties
object, and the freemarkerVariables
property requires a
java.util.Map
. The following example shows how to use a FreeMarkerConfigurer
:
-
Java
-
Kotlin
@Configuration
@EnableWebFlux
public class WebConfig implements WebFluxConfigurer {
// ...
@Bean
public FreeMarkerConfigurer freeMarkerConfigurer() {
Map<String, Object> variables = new HashMap<>();
variables.put("xml_escape", new XmlEscape());
FreeMarkerConfigurer configurer = new FreeMarkerConfigurer();
configurer.setTemplateLoaderPath("classpath:/templates");
configurer.setFreemarkerVariables(variables);
return configurer;
}
}
@Configuration
@EnableWebFlux
class WebConfig : WebFluxConfigurer {
// ...
@Bean
fun freeMarkerConfigurer() = FreeMarkerConfigurer().apply {
setTemplateLoaderPath("classpath:/templates")
setFreemarkerVariables(mapOf("xml_escape" to XmlEscape()))
}
}
See the FreeMarker documentation for details of settings and variables as they apply to
the Configuration
object.
Form Handling
Spring provides a tag library for use in JSPs that contains, among others, a
<spring:bind/>
element. This element primarily lets forms display values from
form-backing objects and show the results of failed validations from a Validator
in the
web or business tier. Spring also has support for the same functionality in FreeMarker,
with additional convenience macros for generating form input elements themselves.
The Bind Macros
A standard set of macros are maintained within the spring-webflux.jar
file for
FreeMarker, so they are always available to a suitably configured application.
Some of the macros defined in the Spring templating libraries are considered internal
(private), but no such scoping exists in the macro definitions, making all macros visible
to calling code and user templates. The following sections concentrate only on the macros
you need to directly call from within your templates. If you wish to view the macro code
directly, the file is called spring.ftl
and is in the
org.springframework.web.reactive.result.view.freemarker
package.
For additional details on binding support, see Simple Binding for Spring MVC.
Script Views
The Spring Framework has a built-in integration for using Spring WebFlux with any templating library that can run on top of the JSR-223 Java scripting engine. The following table shows the templating libraries that we have tested on different script engines:
Scripting Library | Scripting Engine |
---|---|
The basic rule for integrating any other script engine is that it must implement the
ScriptEngine and Invocable interfaces.
|
Requirements
You need to have the script engine on your classpath, the details of which vary by script engine:
-
The Nashorn JavaScript engine is provided with Java 8+. Using the latest update release available is highly recommended.
-
JRuby should be added as a dependency for Ruby support.
-
Jython should be added as a dependency for Python support.
-
org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-script-util
dependency and aMETA-INF/services/javax.script.ScriptEngineFactory
file containing aorg.jetbrains.kotlin.script.jsr223.KotlinJsr223JvmLocalScriptEngineFactory
line should be added for Kotlin script support. See this example for more detail.
You need to have the script templating library. One way to do that for JavaScript is through WebJars.
Script Templates
You can declare a ScriptTemplateConfigurer
bean to specify the script engine to use,
the script files to load, what function to call to render templates, and so on.
The following example uses Mustache templates and the Nashorn JavaScript engine:
-
Java
-
Kotlin
@Configuration
@EnableWebFlux
public class WebConfig implements WebFluxConfigurer {
@Override
public void configureViewResolvers(ViewResolverRegistry registry) {
registry.scriptTemplate();
}
@Bean
public ScriptTemplateConfigurer configurer() {
ScriptTemplateConfigurer configurer = new ScriptTemplateConfigurer();
configurer.setEngineName("nashorn");
configurer.setScripts("mustache.js");
configurer.setRenderObject("Mustache");
configurer.setRenderFunction("render");
return configurer;
}
}
@Configuration
@EnableWebFlux
class WebConfig : WebFluxConfigurer {
override fun configureViewResolvers(registry: ViewResolverRegistry) {
registry.scriptTemplate()
}
@Bean
fun configurer() = ScriptTemplateConfigurer().apply {
engineName = "nashorn"
setScripts("mustache.js")
renderObject = "Mustache"
renderFunction = "render"
}
}
The render
function is called with the following parameters:
-
String template
: The template content -
Map model
: The view model -
RenderingContext renderingContext
: TheRenderingContext
that gives access to the application context, the locale, the template loader, and the URL (since 5.0)
Mustache.render()
is natively compatible with this signature, so you can call it directly.
If your templating technology requires some customization, you can provide a script that implements a custom render function. For example, Handlerbars needs to compile templates before using them and requires a polyfill in order to emulate some browser facilities not available in the server-side script engine. The following example shows how to set a custom render function:
-
Java
-
Kotlin
@Configuration
@EnableWebFlux
public class WebConfig implements WebFluxConfigurer {
@Override
public void configureViewResolvers(ViewResolverRegistry registry) {
registry.scriptTemplate();
}
@Bean
public ScriptTemplateConfigurer configurer() {
ScriptTemplateConfigurer configurer = new ScriptTemplateConfigurer();
configurer.setEngineName("nashorn");
configurer.setScripts("polyfill.js", "handlebars.js", "render.js");
configurer.setRenderFunction("render");
configurer.setSharedEngine(false);
return configurer;
}
}
@Configuration
@EnableWebFlux
class WebConfig : WebFluxConfigurer {
override fun configureViewResolvers(registry: ViewResolverRegistry) {
registry.scriptTemplate()
}
@Bean
fun configurer() = ScriptTemplateConfigurer().apply {
engineName = "nashorn"
setScripts("polyfill.js", "handlebars.js", "render.js")
renderFunction = "render"
isSharedEngine = false
}
}
Setting the sharedEngine property to false is required when using non-thread-safe
script engines with templating libraries not designed for concurrency, such as Handlebars or
React running on Nashorn. In that case, Java SE 8 update 60 is required, due to
this bug, but it is generally
recommended to use a recent Java SE patch release in any case.
|
polyfill.js
defines only the window
object needed by Handlebars to run properly,
as the following snippet shows:
var window = {};
This basic render.js
implementation compiles the template before using it. A production
ready implementation should also store and reused cached templates or pre-compiled templates.
This can be done on the script side, as well as any customization you need (managing
template engine configuration for example).
The following example shows how compile a template:
function render(template, model) {
var compiledTemplate = Handlebars.compile(template);
return compiledTemplate(model);
}
Scripting Library | Scripting Engine |
---|---|
The basic rule for integrating any other script engine is that it must implement the
ScriptEngine and Invocable interfaces.
|
Setting the sharedEngine property to false is required when using non-thread-safe
script engines with templating libraries not designed for concurrency, such as Handlebars or
React running on Nashorn. In that case, Java SE 8 update 60 is required, due to
this bug, but it is generally
recommended to use a recent Java SE patch release in any case.
|
JSON and XML
For Content Negotiation purposes, it is useful to be able to alternate
between rendering a model with an HTML template or as other formats (such as JSON or XML),
depending on the content type requested by the client. To support doing so, Spring WebFlux
provides the HttpMessageWriterView
, which you can use to plug in any of the available
Codecs from spring-web
, such as Jackson2JsonEncoder
, Jackson2SmileEncoder
,
or Jaxb2XmlEncoder
.
Unlike other view technologies, HttpMessageWriterView
does not require a ViewResolver
but is instead configured as a default view. You can
configure one or more such default views, wrapping different HttpMessageWriter
instances
or Encoder
instances. The one that matches the requested content type is used at runtime.
In most cases, a model contains multiple attributes. To determine which one to serialize,
you can configure HttpMessageWriterView
with the name of the model attribute to use for
rendering. If the model contains only one attribute, that one is used.