ui generation

[ajay brar <aj...@hotmail.com>]

hi!

What i am trying to do is allow a user to create a personalized web 
interface.
he should as such be able to select layouts, choose what goes where, colours 
etc and in the end it should generate a html page for him.

my questions are:
1> is it possible for me to generate a jsp page using struts tags, feed that 
to a parser and get the resulting html, like what would happen if i made a 
regular jsp/struts page and then a user clicks on it, and the page is 
processed and html spewed to the user's browser. How do i make that happen 
from within a page. ie, in one page a user selects all these layouts etc and 
clicks some generate button and a file with the resulting html gets stored 
somewhere on the server which the user can then download.

2> can i dynamically write a tile definitions.xml, depending on the layout 
and the components chosen and have that fed to the parser from q1.

thanks for any help

cheers
Ajay

_________________________________________________________________
Hot chart ringtones and polyphonics. Go to  
http://ninemsn.com.au/mobilemania/default.asp


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: struts-user-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: struts-user-help@jakarta.apache.org

Re: ui generation

[James Neville <ja...@babcockbrown.com>]

Ajay,

>
> he should as such be able to select layouts, choose what goes where, 
> colours etc and in the end it should generate a html page for him. 

We're doing something pretty similar here, but not using the Tiles stuff 
(for now anyway).
Basically, we have user selectable themes, which write the appropriate 
css file to the page.
There are *some* user definable colours, fonts etc, the values of which 
are pulled from the DB on login, stored in the session, and written to 
the page as styles that override the default, or user selected css theme 
file.

> my questions are:
> 1> is it possible for me to generate a jsp page using struts tags, 
> feed that to a parser and get the resulting html, like what would 
> happen if i made a regular jsp/struts page and then a user clicks on 
> it, and the page is processed and html spewed to the user's browser. 
> How do i make that happen from within a page. ie, in one page a user 
> selects all these layouts etc and clicks some generate button and a 
> file with the resulting html gets stored somewhere on the server which 
> the user can then download.

I'd assume that you would want a variety of layouts such as 
top/left/right navigation, one/two/three column body etc.

We do something similar where a user has selectable templates for layout 
as well as the themes.
We simply have jsps for each template, and dependant on the user 
requesting the page the Action redirects to the appropriate template.
At the moment, most of the relevant content is split into smaller jsp 
fragments, and incuded on the template pages, so that we don't need to 
rewrite the view in multiple places.
We also intend to have customisable content (a-la Yahoo portal), where 
the template simply checks which content is required for the user,  and 
includes the relevant page fragments where necessary.........

>
> 2> can i dynamically write a tile definitions.xml, depending on the 
> layout and the components chosen and have that fed to the parser from q1. 

....... i'm also keen to know whether we can do something like this with 
Tiles, but I have no experience of using them just yet.
Has anyone else has success doing custom UI generation with Tiles, 
possibly pulling the layout definition from a DB?

There surely must be something that does this out of the box already, no?

Cheers,
James


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: struts-user-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: struts-user-help@jakarta.apache.org