Support for Nesting and Slotting from External Projects

[edeknede]

I would like to create a component library using JTE that can be reused across multiple projects. I have the following questions:

Is it possible to load templates (nesting) and slots (slotting) from an external project?
If so, are there recommended approaches or best practices for this?
The background of my request is that I want to develop a central library containing various components that can be used in different projects. This would greatly improve the reusability and maintainability of my templates.

I have noticed that the Qute Templating Engine supports this functionality, while Thymeleaf does not. Therefore, it would be great if JTE could offer this capability as well.

Thank you in advance for your support!

Best regards,

[edward3h]

Can you give a concrete example of what this would look like? I looked at the Qute page you linked to, but I don't see mention of components there..

[trathschlag]

Hi @edward3h I am working on the same project as @edeknede. I think what we want to achieve can be boiled down to: We want to define components (or fragments/snippets/layouts) with JTE, put them into a maven artifact and use them with JTE in several different projects.

Hope this makes it clear!

[edward3h]

I understand the general idea, but I'd like to see some more specific examples, preferably with actual code.

Can you try building an example project yourselves, and let us know where you get stuck?

[edward3h]

I'm not sure if this would work for you, but I have used Daisy UI on a couple of projects. It's a CSS library that helps make a variety of components on top of fairly basic HTML.

[trathschlag]

Thanks for your quick answer! I or someone from our team will provide a code example. It might just take some time because of the holiday season here in Germany.

[anosim114]

Hi @edward3h, I'm yet another one from the same project as @edeknede and @trathschlag.

Our current state is, if we would use Thymeleaf or Qute we would end up with a project structure roughly looking like this:

component-project/     
-- src/main/resources/templates/
---- componentA.qute.html        <-------|
---- componentN.qute.html                |
                                         |
server-project-A/                        |
-- src/main/                             |
---- java/ServerA.java                   |
---- resources/templates/                |
------ index1.qute.html  -- referencing -|
                                         |
server-project-B/                        |
-- src/main/                             |
---- java/ServerB.java                   |
---- resources/templates/                |
------ index2.qute.html  -- referencing -|

Since the templates are loaded from the classpath in Thymeleaf or Qute we can reference componentA in both projects simply by including component-project as a dependency.

You can see an example of this concept working in this project:

• Some Component in some component project (example-component-lib)
• Some other project template file referencing it (example-backend)

The question is if that's possible with JTE as well, replacing the .qute.html template with jte looking at the example above.
Currently my understanding is that it's not since the templates get loaded via a DirectoryResolver and would all need to live in the same directory?

[casid]

Hi,

I started a draft of a feature called jte modules about a year ago. At that time it looked like the company I'm working for (and uses jte), would need this for modularizing their code base. So far it turned out it doesn't need it yet and we left it in the drawer until we have a proper use case for it.

#279
#278

I'm currently using all of my free time after work for a video game project, so I only do the bare minimum for jte maintenance right now.

This feature is still rough and it will require quite some time, planning and designing before taking it live. It certainly would be a really useful one, but I won't be able to contribute much to it at the moment.

If you need something that works right now, I think you should pick an existing library that already supports what you need.

[C0mbatwombat]

Hi @casid,

At work we are using jte more and more, the performance and DX is just so superior to all other templating frameworks. We are even planning to integrate jte with JDBI to use it as our SQL/ORM framework (using jte-models we get a compile-time validated system that spits out PreparedQuery's like mybatis).

Being able to reuse and reference templates across multiple trees/modules is the main thing that is still missing to use it in a larger-scale system like we do. We can get a long way symlinking/copying files in Bazel, but this is not ideal, we lose autocomplete in IntelliJ for example.
So would be great if you could find the time to look at this, because I think you have really struck gold with this framework and this would remove the last major barrier to use it. I understand free time is limited so no worries if it is not possible.

Thanks