Allan, If you are simply selecting the body while the whole site has the same wrapper, why use SiteMesh? It is a filter which wraps anything matching specific patterns (could be *.jsp, *.html, or even /someSection/* which needs it's own look such as a cross site agreement) and kicks it out with it's own wrapping JSP yet your body. Bodies may also be nested depending on the template. Take a look at it at: http://www.opensymphony.com/sitemesh/
With Tiles, you could always make every page invoke one specific tile which lists a Tile(s?)Controller in the definition. That definition could parse the URI (or pull the name from a scope bean created by your action) and insert the appropriate "center" tile for you. I'd recommend extending org.apache.struts.tiles.ControllerSupport. For what you described, I do not recommend making your actions subclass TilesAction because you would have much more work than simply implementing a TilesController in your particular template. See tiles controllers starting in section 5.2.1 of the Tiles Advanced Features (link at bottom of this page: http://struts.apache.org/userGuide/dev_tiles.html). I'm sure you will get other interesting suggestions and opinions. :) Regards, David -----Original Message----- From: Tait, Allen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2004 1:34 PM To: 'Struts Users Mailing List' Subject: Web Site vs Web Application I'm interested in implementing the Struts and Tiles frameworks for a web site (moving slowly toward web application). Is it possible, or even recommended to design something similar to the following for the static portions of a web site. Assume Tiles have been defined to provide a common site wrapper. What's left is to select the body (jsp or Tile). Do this by defining a layout that will provide the site wrapper and receive that content/body (page or Tile) as a parameter. Then a generic "action" could grab the page requested from URL and put into common scope. The layout would grab the requested page name from the common scope and result in the requested page. An approach like this seems to simplify the adding of new content pages by eliminating configuration for tiles and struts. It seems this would also help when implementing a content management system that would simply add the content (body) portion of these pages. For example, once a body was added to the site, a request for that page would be successful with no additional configuration. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
