Overview
SiteMesh is a web-page layout and decoration framework and web- application integration framework to aid in creating large sites consisting of many pages for which a consistent look/feel, navigation and layout scheme is required.
Integrating WebWork with SiteMesh is amazingly simple: you don't have to do anything in fact. WebWork stores all its value stack information in the request attributes, meaning that if you wish to display data that is in the stack (or even the ActionContext) you can do so by using the normal tag libraries that come with WebWork. That's it!
Passing data around
One thing to note is when you want to pass a value from a decorated page to a decorator using the <ww:set> tag, you need to specify a scope (request, session, application) if the decorated page is invoked directly (not a result of an action). By default if no action has been executed and no scope was specified, the set value will only availlable from the same PageContext. Look here for more information.
Localization
WebWork provides easy to use i18n functionality to SiteMesh decorators. Now using the <ww:text/> tag works seemlessly. In the event where you need to reference an i18n string, use the id attribute as documented in the Text tag. An example of such situation is given below.
Typically embedding i18n in to form elements would be done using the following:
<ww:textfield label="%{getText('com.acme.login.text')}" name="login"/>
However, due to the way WebWork and SiteMesh work, you would need to seperate the above code in to two tags.
<ww:text id="login" name="com.acme.login.text"/> <ww:textfield label="#login" name="login"/>
Custom Decorators
In WebWork's Architecture, the standard filter-chain optionally starts with the ActionContextCleanUp filter, followed by other desired filters. Lastly, the FilterDispatcher handles the request, usually passing it on to the ActionMapper.
Warning
If ActionContext access is required within the decorators, the ActionContextCleanUp filter must be placed at the beginning of their filter-chain. This tells the FilterDispatcher when, exactly, to clean-up the request.
Velocity
If you are using Velocity for your SiteMesh decorators, we recommend using the VelocityPageFilter. This is an extension of the SiteMesh PageFilter, which should be placed in the web.xml in between the ActionContextCleanUp and the FilterDispatcher. Now decorators will access to WebWork variables such as $stack and $page.