play-partials

A library used to retrieve HTML partials to use when composing HTML Play frontend applications.

In supports caching the partials.

Adding to your service

Include the following dependency in your SBT build

resolvers += Resolver.bintrayRepo("hmrc", "releases")

libraryDependencies += "uk.gov.hmrc" %% "play-partials" % "x.x.x"

The HtmlPartial type

Use this type to read an HTTP response containing a partial, and safely handle the possible outcomes:

• For success (2xx) status codes, an HtmlPartial.Success is returned, which contains the HTML body and optionally a hint on the title that should be used on the page.
• For non-success (400 -> 599) status codes, an HtmlPartial.Failure is returned
• A handler is also supplied which translates connection-related exceptions into an HtmlPartial.Failure

Examples

import HtmlPartial._

object Connector {
	def somePartial(): Future[HtmlPartial] = 
	  http.GET[HtmlPartial](url("/some/url")) recover connectionExceptionsAsHtmlPartialFailure
}

// Elsewhere in your service:
Connector.partial.map(p =>
  Ok(views.html.my_view(partial = p successfulContentOrElse Html("Sorry, there's been a problem retrieving ...")))
)

// or, if you just want to blank out a missing partial:
Connector.partial.map(p =>
  Ok(views.html.my_view(partial = p successfulContentOrEmpty))
)

// or, if you want to have finer-grained control:
Connector.partial.map {
  case HtmlPartial.Success(Some(title), content) => 
    Ok(views.html.my_view(message = content, title = title))
  case HtmlPartial.Success(None, content)        => 
    Ok(views.html.my_view(message = content, title = "A fallback title"))
  case HtmlPartial.Failure                       => 
    Ok(views.html.my_view(message = Html("Sorry, there's been a technical problem retrieving your info"), title = "A fallback title"))
}

Using cached static partials

If you need to use a static cached partial, use the CachedStaticHtmlPartialRetriever trait. It will retrieve the partial from the given URL and cache it (the cache key is the partial URL) for the defined period of time. You can also pass through a map of parameters used to replace placeholders in the retrieved partial. Placeholders have the form of {{parameterKey}}.

You can manage the cache parameters by overriding refreshAfter, expireAfter and maximumEntries attributes.

A simple example of using the partials provider

object CachedStaticHtmlPartialProvider extends CachedStaticHtmlPartial {
  override val httpGet = ???
}

val partial = CachedStaticHtmlPartialProvider.get("http://my.partial")

### Using HTML Form partials

A special case of the static partials are HTML forms. By using FormPartialRetriever a {{csrfToken}} placeholder will be replaced with the Play CSRF token value.

License

This code is open source software licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.