Jakarta Struts Cookbook

14.4. Creating Tabbed Panes

Problem

You want your pages to display as tabbed folders.

Solution

Use the Tiles Tabbed Layout. Example 14-7 shows the JSP page (tabsLayout.jsp) that lays out components in a tabbed fashion.

Example 14-7. Tiles tabbed layout

<%@ taglib uri="http://struts.apache.org/tags-bean" prefix="bean" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://struts.apache.org/tags-logic" prefix="logic" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://struts.apache.org/tags-tiles" prefix="tiles" %>

<%-- 
  Tabs Layout .
  This layout allows to render several tiles in a tabs fashion.
  @param tabList A list of available tabs. We use MenuItem to 
  carry data (name, body, icon, ...)
  @param selectedIndex Index of default selected tab
  @param parameterName Name of parameter carrying selected info in http request.
--%>

<%-- 
Use tiles attributes, and declare them as page java variable.
These attribute must be passed to the tile. 
--%>

<tiles:useAttribute name="parameterName" classname="java.lang.String" />
<tiles:useAttribute id="selectedIndexStr" name="selectedIndex" 
 ignore="true" classname="java.lang.String" />
<tiles:useAttribute name="tabList" classname="java.util.List" />
<%
  String selectedColor="#98ABC7";
  String notSelectedColor="#C0C0C0";
  
  int index = 0; // Loop index
  int selectedIndex = 0;
    // Check if selected come from request parameter
  try {
    selectedIndex = Integer.parseInt(selectedIndexStr);
    selectedIndex = Integer.parseInt(request.getParameter( parameterName ));
    }
   catch( java.lang.NumberFormatException ex ) { // do nothing } // Check ...