Comments on: Runtime dispatching freemarker macros for pojo views

By: D Kevin

D Kevin — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:17:24 +0000

I found your article pretty handy. I am trying to relate it to my requirement.
I need to write a freemarker macro which would take a “java bean object” as argument.
This macro should pass this “bean object” to java class reflection class, get all the bean properties and render it to html page.

After going through your post, I feel it’s definitely doable by doing some brainstorming.
Any help / comments would be appreciated !!!

By: cherouvim

cherouvim — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 20:00:50 +0000

@Anon: I’m not sure if you understood this post.

I use Java to full potential but default web templating option (JSP) suffers. I present alternatives and compare with other languages.

By: Anon

Anon — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 19:55:03 +0000

This is a typical (and meaningless) argument “strong-typed language vs weak-typed language”. Why bother with Java if you are not planning to take advantage of it?

By: kevin

kevin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:45:57 +0000

You are a savior!

By: cherouvim

cherouvim — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 05:15:49 +0000

@kevin: yes it’s possible. In fact I’m doing it all the time in a form handling framework I’ve written.

< #local fieldName="firstName" />
${(“person.” + fieldName)?eval}

The above evaluates the expression ${person.firstName} which is what you want.

By: kevin

kevin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 02:55:58 +0000

I find your post intriguing and I’m trying to do something similar… I want to invoke a particular getter based on the value that is in another value, so that I can use the same template to render multiple different types of pojos. So I have a pojo of type Person and a sequence of attribute names like “firstName”, “lastName”, etc. both of which were passed in at runtime. Then I want my template to invoke pojo.firstName, pojo.lastName, etc to populate a table. This same template would be able to fill the table with data from any kind of pojo, as long as you also passed in the corresponding sequence of attribute names you wished to pull from the pojo. Do you happen to know if this is possible in Freemarker?

By: cherouvim

cherouvim — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 10:42:02 +0000

@biddster: glad it helps.

By: biddster

biddster — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 10:17:19 +0000

Good point. Thanks for the article, exactly what I needed. I’m creating UI widget system using freemarker and this was just what I needed.

By: cherouvim

cherouvim — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:38:36 +0000

@biddster: Yes of course. I wrote this when I was still on JDK 1.4

By: biddster

biddster — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:10:30 +0000

Could you not do issue.class.simpleName and avoid the splitting?

By: Bill Bartmann

Bill Bartmann — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:47:05 +0000

Cool site, love the info.

By: cherouvim

cherouvim — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:52:18 +0000

Thanks Victor! Fixed.

By: Victor

Victor — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 13:42:26 +0000

Now I noticed how badly HTML-tags worked in this comment field.

What I meant to say was:

(open-tag)#renderIssue issue /(closetag) should be

(open-tag)@renderIssue issue /(closetag).

By: Victor

Victor — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 13:41:18 +0000

Good article – it shows how flexible you can write Freemarker templates.

There is however a small bug:

–> <–

… should be