Support for Thymeleaf templates and static resources in Starter-like modules

[igo]

It would be great to be able to decompose webapp into Starter-like modules. These modules would contain not only java classes but also Thymeleaf templates and static resources. For example, Boot should be able to support creating reusable module called "starter-users" which contains model, services and controllers for user registration, login, management, etc... with all java classes, thymeleaf views and static files.

[dsyer]

What you describe sounds more like an autoconfigure plugin (like the actuator is already) than a pure starter, but I like the idea. In fact it is already supported as far as I know (haven't tried it, have you?) - I suppose you might have to add additional directories to the Thymeleaf template path, but that makes sense anyway to avoid overlap.

[igo]

I tried loading templates from other jars with ClassLoaderTemplateResolver but when running webapp as war it cannot load templates from other jars (or at least I didn't find out how). So there would be necessary to make some other template merging mechanism (ie. maven overlays or unpack-copy).

[dsyer]

Can you share your code? I see no reason why classpath resources shouldn't work irrespective of where they are, so I'd like to get some more concrete details on this.

[igo]

My scenario: jar project and war project. war project has jar project as dependency. Views from jar project located in src/main/resources are not resolved. Views from war project are resolved from src/main/resources and also from /WEB-INF/views. Here is a part of configuration:

@Configuration
public class ThymeleafConfig {

    @Bean
    public ClassLoaderTemplateResolver classLoaderTemplateResolver() {
        ClassLoaderTemplateResolver resolver = new ClassLoaderTemplateResolver();
        resolver.setPrefix("/");
        resolver.setSuffix(".html");
        resolver.setTemplateMode("HTML5");
        resolver.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
        resolver.setCacheable(false);
        return resolver;
    }

    @Bean
    public ServletContextTemplateResolver servletContextTemplateResolver() {
        ServletContextTemplateResolver resolver = new ServletContextTemplateResolver();
        resolver.setPrefix("/WEB-INF/views/");
        resolver.setSuffix(".html");
        resolver.setTemplateMode("HTML5");
        resolver.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
        resolver.setCacheable(false);
        return resolver;
    }

    @Bean
    public SpringTemplateEngine templateEngine() {
        SpringTemplateEngine templateEngine = new SpringTemplateEngine();
        Set<ITemplateResolver> resolvers = new HashSet<ITemplateResolver>();
        resolvers.add(classLoaderTemplateResolver());
        resolvers.add(servletContextTemplateResolver());
        templateEngine.setTemplateResolvers(resolvers);
        return templateEngine;
    }

    @Bean
    public ThymeleafViewResolver thymeleafViewResolver() {
        ThymeleafViewResolver resolver = new ThymeleafViewResolver();
        resolver.setTemplateEngine(templateEngine());
        resolver.setOrder(1);
        resolver.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
        return resolver;
    }

...

}

[jdbranham]

I had a similar thought, and was able to resolve the templates using a custom resolver. You can check out the project here -

https://github.com/savantly-net/sprout-spring-boot-starter

Update - I've grown the idea into a complete platform if anyone is interested
https://github.com/savantly-net/sprout-platform

[bclozel]

I don't think this approach fits in the scope of this project nor that we should provide an opinion about that. I'm closing this issue now.

@jdbranham if you'd like this starter to be listed with other community-maintained starters here, please follow the guidelines documented in our reference docs and then submit a new issue on this tracker.

[jdbranham]

Thanks @bclozel
My project may be too opinionated now as I've expanded on the original scope, but thanks for the heads-up!