Add an option to use include instead of forward mode in Tiles support [SPR-12374]

[spring-projects-issues]

Ivo Leitão opened SPR-12374 and commented

I've updated tiles version from 2.2.2 to 3.0.1 in my spring portlet mvc implementation deployed over weblogic. I currently have a workaround to address blank pages appearing on portlet content. The solution is based in what is described in the reference URL. It involves applying:

ServletUtil.setForceInclude(request, true);

With this the problem was resolved. Is there any kind of similar solution for tiles3? In tiles3 i am facing the same situation and i can't find the ServletUtil class or any alternative to help me solve this problem.

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Affects: 4.1.1

Reference URL: http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?98961-Webflow-with-JSP-Tiles-Portlet-has-no-content/page2

Referenced from: commits cfa3d35

[spring-projects-issues]

Sébastien Deleuze commented

After various tests, I confirm that with the default configuration, Tiles support displays empty Portlets with Tiles 2 and Tiles 3, at least when using Apache Pluto.

By default, Tiles uses Servlet forward (not include) to render a JSP by default. When a Portlet is added to an existing JSP, the render phase is active, so forwarding is not possible. Pluto has a fallback mechanism to use include instead of forward mode if needed, but it seems this functionality is broken. I have created PLUTO-641 to describe exactly this potential issue on Pluto side.

As reported, forcing the include mode on Spring side fixes Portlet rendering for both Tiles 2 and Tiles 3 (even if the attribute name to set is different), so I plan to address this issue by adding an alwaysInclude boolean property to TilesView and TilesViewResolver (in both Tiles 2 and Tiles 3 support), like the existing one in InternalResourceView and InternalResourceViewResolver classes.

See this commit for more details.