FreeMarker templates via Spring in non-web application

2012-12-16

FreeMarker templates via Spring in non-web application

Spring bean configuration

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC '-//SPRING//DTD BEAN 2.0//EN' 'http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans-2.0.dtd'>
<beans>

  <!-- freemarker config -->
  <bean id="freemarkerConfiguration" class="org.springframework.ui.freemarker.FreeMarkerConfigurationFactoryBean">
    <property name="templateLoaderPath" value="classpath:/templates/"/>
    <property name="defaultEncoding" value="utf-8"/>
    <property name="freemarkerSettings">
      <value>
      locale=cs_CZ
      </value>
    </property>
  </bean>

</beans>

Note that the templates are inside the .jar, thus on the classpath, so we used the classpath: pseudo-protocol. I have my templates placed in the templates „package“, that is, in src/templates, so my value is classpath:/templates/.

Also note the way to specify java.util.Properties for freemarkerSettings property. Spring can take text representation and tries to convert it to a Properties object, as described in the official Spring 2.5 manual, section 3.3.2.1. Straight values.

To see the list of supported FreeMarker settings, please read the following parts of the FreeMarker Java API doc:

I have tried output_encoding=utf-8, but it did not work well, so I used defaultEncoding.

Template file

This is the example from the NetBeans FreeMarker support project. It works with three variables, package, class and user; all supposed to be Strings.

<#if package?? && package != "">
package ${package};
</#if>
/**
 * ${class}
 *
 * @author ${user}
 */

Using the template

Assuming that beanFactory is Spring Bean Factory object:

Configuration cfg = (Configuration)beanFactory.getBean( "freemarkerConfiguration" );
try {
  Template temp = cfg.getTemplate( "test.template" );
  Map root = new HashMap();
  root.put( "user", "Andrea Peniaková" );
  root.put( "class", "TopClass" );
  StringWriter str = new StringWriter();
  temp.process(root, str);
  String resultString = str.toString();
}
catch( IOException ex ) {
  log.log( Level.SEVERE, null, ex );
}
catch( TemplateException ex ) {
  log.log( Level.SEVERE, null, ex );
}

The Result

As you expect, the result looks like this:

/**
 * TopClass
 *
 * @author Andrea Peniaková
 */
0