Tired of breaking the links in your JSPs? Using taglibs?

Then this VRaptor plugin may help you!

Take a look at ExampleController for a first impression.

Nice features

Links to controllers

It's really bad when we change the URL of a controller's method and we need to search in our project for every place where it appears and update it, isn't it? Well, you can avoid it with this library!

In order to create a link to a controller method, say MyController.myMethod(arg), you create a Url object in the following way:

Url myLink = url(); to(MyController.class).myMethod(null);

Now, to put it on the page, just create a href attribute and pass it, like this:

a(href(myLink)).with("Link to my controller")

List generation

Oftenly we want to list something in our pages, like Products from a database. Usually, we do something like a for inside a tag, but we cannot do that the way we are constructing our page using this DSL. So, to accomplish that, you are going to create an Elements object.

The Elements object is like a collection: you can put other elements inside it (using the append method). Thus, to create a HTML list based on a Java collection, you can do the following:

Collection<String> items;
// fill the collection
Tag itemsInHTML = ul(convertToHTML(items));

NestedElement convertToHTML(Collection<String> items) {
	Elements elements = new Elements();
	for (String item : items) {
		elements.append(li("We have the item " + item));
	}
	return elements;
}

This is a little uncomfortable, isn't it? Well, if you agree with me, there is another way, much less verbose, using the Elements.format static method:

Collection<String> items;
// fill the collection
Tag itemsInHTML = ul(format(items).using(this).formatItem(null));

NestedElement formatItem(String item) {
	return li("We have the item " + item);
}

Pretty much less verbose, isn't it? You can call format with any Iterable. Then you call the method using to tell the library which method you want it to call in which object to format each item of the Iterable and put it inside an Elements object. In the last example, it will call the formatItem method in this same instance for each String in items.

Shortcuts

There are common tasks we need to perform when writing a page, such as importing CSS, JavaScript and images. For these things, we have shortcut methods in the PageTagFactory:

• JavaScript: js("https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js")
• CSS: css("/css/example.css")
• Images: image("/images/image.png", "Alt text")

Notice that the URL begins with a slash. The shorcut puts the Web Application Context in that case, just like the <c:url> tag in the JSTL.

FormFor

This one is yet to come...

Using it

1. Put vraptor-html-dsl-1.0.jar in your WEB-INF/lib folder. You can get a copy from the example project (in the folder example/WebContent/WEB-INF/lib).
2. Create a class to represent your page: make it implement the br.com.caelum.vraptor.html.Page interface. Take a look at IndexPage and ListPage in the example project.
3. In your controller, create an instance of your page and return it from your method, or tell the VRaptor's Result to use it as the output: result.use(html()).page(new YourPage()) That's it!

How to write a page

You are going to use methods to represent the HTML tags. For example, to create a <li> tag, you use the li() method. All methods to create tags are in the class PageTagFactory and can be static imported.

In order to put some content inside the tag, call the method with(...) and pass the text or the tags to be put inside this tag. For example, to generate the HTML <li><b>Interesting!</b></li>, you are going to write li().with(b().with("Interesting!")). Notice that, when you need to mix text and tags inside another tag, you need to use the text(...) method, passing the text inside it; for example: li().with(text("Some "), b().with("really interesting"), text(" text!")) will generate <li>Some <b>really interesting</b> text!</li>.

To put attributes inside a tag, you are also going to use methods like attributeName("attributeValue"). For instance, if you want to put the id "reallyNice" and the href "google.com" in your <a> tag, you can write a(id("reallyNice"), href("google.com")). All the currently implemented attributes (not very much by now) can be created by static methods in the PageAttributeFactory class.

If you want to create a custom tag or if you need an attribute that is not yet implemented, it's easy to create your own. Take a look at the br.com.caelum.vraptor.html.tags.Body class for an example of tag and at the br.com.caelum.vraptor.html.attributes.Id for an example of attribute.

Pitfall

Unfortunately, the Java language has some words (types or keywords) that difficult our lives when using the DSL. For instance, if you want to create the class attribute in a tag, you cannot call the class() method, because it's a keyword of the language.

Collaborate!

Many attributes are not yet implemented and probably you are going to need one that is not implemented yet. In that case, please collaborate! Fork the project, implement it and make a pull request.

Also, you may have ideas of shortcuts or new syntax to include in the project. Take a look at the issues of the project, open one, give examples. Implement, also, if you are willing :)

Working with the project

The main project uses Maven to manage its dependencies and to generate its JAR. The example project, inside the example folder, is derived from the VRaptor Blank Project and already comes with an Eclipse Dynamic Web Project file.