8.7 Template Tags

The concept of templates has not been discussed yet in this book. The Template library supplies tags that are useful for creating dynamic JSP templates for pages that share a common format. These tags provide capabilities similar to stylesheets or the standard include directive in JSP technology, but they can be dynamic.

With the advent of the Tiles framework, which we'll discuss in Chapter 14, the template tags become less widely used. Thus, I'll provide a list of the tags within the library, but won't go into detail about them. If you require more information on the tags within the Template tag library, you can find it in the Struts API at http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/api/.

The tags within the Template library are listed in Table 8-10.

Table 8-10. Custom tags within the Template tag library
Tag name	Description
insert	Retrieve (or include) the specified template file, and then insert the specified content into the template's layout. By changing the layout defined in the template file, any other file that inserts the template will automatically use the new layout.
put	Create a request-scope bean that specifies the content to be used by the get tag. Content can be printed directly or included from a JSP or HTML file.
get	Retrieve content from a request-scope bean, for use in the template layout.

Again, the Tiles components provide much more functionality than these standard template tags. Although some organizations still use them, many developers are moving over to the Tiles library.