Spring Thymeleaf Tips | Part 2

Hey guys, I’m back again with a few more tips to help you navigate the waters of Spring Thymeleaf. Part one of this series can be found here.

In this article, we’re going to go over a few intermediate pieces of Thymeleaf’s functionality.

Thymeleaf Standard Expressions

There are several helper objects available to use in templates. They are:

• #dates: utility methods for util.Date objects: formatting, component extraction, etc.
• #calendars: analogous to #dates, but for util.Calendar objects
• #numbers: utility methods for formatting numeric objects
• #strings: utility methods for String objects: contains, startsWith, prepending/appending, etc.
• #objects: utility methods for objects in general
• #bools: utility methods for Boolean evaluation
• #arrays: utility methods for arrays
• #lists: utility methods for lists
• #sets: utility methods for sets
• #maps: utility methods for maps
• #aggregates: utility methods for creating aggregates on arrays or collections
• #messages: utility methods for obtaining externalized messages inside variables expressions, in the same way as they would be obtained using #{…} syntax
• #ids: utility methods for dealing with id attributes that might be repeated (for example, as a result of an iteration)

Import Temporals Expressions To Handle Java 8 Time

If you’re using Java 8’s newer time classes, you will want to include an extra standard template library in your maven file. It contains the #temporals expression set for handling classes like LocalDate and LocalDateTime.

<dependency>

<groupId>org.thymeleaf.extras</groupId>

<artifactId>thymeleaf-extras-java8time</artifactId>

<version>2.1.0.RELEASE</version>

</dependency>

Inject Objects Directly Into Your JavaScript

Using th:inline and a little notation, you can inject anything accessible to Thymeleaf into your JavaScript. We usually use this to create a data object that’s accessible on the global scope for referencing your data objects on page load without an ajax call. I use a namespace with a simple getter and setter running on Lodash to add a little insulation around the global objects.

Using our people example from part 1:

Our JavaScript that runs the getter and setter would look like this:

And Usage of that function would look like this:

Reference Static Classes

You can reference static classes directly in your templates (or inline scripts!) without putting them on the model by calling the full package name. The example below uses this syntax to access an Enum for a comparison operation.

That’s all for today. In the last part of this series, we will cover a few advanced operations including fragments, projection and selection. See you next time!