Jakarta Struts Cookbook

14.6. Using Tiles in a Modular Application

Problem

You are using Struts modules, and you want to define module-specific Tiles definitions.

Solution

Create a separate Tiles definitions file for each module. Then, in each module's Struts configuration file, configure the TilesPlugin, as shown in Example 14-10, to use that module's definitions file and be module-aware.

Example 14-10. Configuring Tiles for a specific module

<plug-in className="org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesPlugin" >
    <!-- Path to XML definition file -->
    <set-property property="definitions-config"
                     value="/WEB-INF/tiles-defs-module1.xml" />
    <!-- Set Module-awareness to true -->
    <set-property property="moduleAware" value="true" />
</plug-in>

Discussion

Like configuration files for the Struts Validator, you can separate your Tiles definitions into multiple files. If you are using modules, you can create Tiles definitions, which can only be accessed from within a specific module, by declaring that definition file in the module's Struts configuration file. To ensure that Tiles handles module-relative paths when it processes requests, you must set the moduleAware property to true. By being module-aware when you forward to a definition, the definition name will be pulled from the definitions for that module. Definition names have to be unique within a module.

Suppose your application has two modules: the default module and an administration module. The struts-config-admin.xml file, shown in Example 14-11 configures the administration ...