Now that we have installed Facelets into our project, it’s time to explore its interesting features. Let’s start with templating, as that is probably the thing that we miss the most in JSF.
We are going to create a template for our MIAS system. With Facelets, a template is just an ordinary XHTML page with placeholders for the content. For the placeholders, we use the<ui:insert>
tag. It has one compulsory attribute, name
. This name is used to refer to the placeholder in any page that uses the template. A placeholder can be empty, such as the<ui:insert name="content"/>
tag in the next example. If the placeholder is not empty, the contents will serve as default content when no value is applied by the page using the template. An example of this is the highlighted lines in the next example. If the page does not define a title, the text ** NO TITLE SET ** will appear in the title bar of the browser.
Another feature of Facelets that is demonstrated...