Re: [Webwork-user] Web "Skins"

[Rickard O. <ri...@te...>]

> Rickard,
> How easy (any examples?) for creating "skins".

WebWork comes with a HelloWorld example that has two skins (called brief and
verbose).

Basically it comes to down to this. Assumptions:
* Action objects return JSP URL's that are relative (i.e. "foo.jsp" instead
of "/foo.jsp")
* All JSP's for the apps default skin is in the directory "/skin1"

So, if the following is executed:
/myapp/skin1/Foo.action?result=foo.jsp
the results will be viewed with:
/skin1/foo.jsp
All relative links within foo.jsp (<A HREF>'s and forms etc.) will be parsed
relative to /skin1, as usual.

This means that if you copy the /skin1 directory to /skin2 you now
immediately gave a new "skin". And using it is as simple as doing:
/myapp/skin2/Foo.action?result=foo.jsp
which will view
/skin2/foo.jsp

The use of skins can be used for many purposes. One could be to support many
kinds of clients, but another could be for internationalization, i.e. the
skins look exactly the same but the content text are in different languages.
And of course you can combine it. Let's say you have two client types
("simple" and "standard") and you want to support the languages English and
Swedish ("en" and "se" locales), then you would have four different skins
which could be organized as follows:
/simple/en -> simple style English
/simple/se -> simple style Swedish
/standard/en -> standard style English
/standard/se -> standard style Swedish

Now you can allow the user to select language and style in some preferences
dialog, and all you have to do is direct the user to the right initial
directory. From there on it is "business as usual".

I hope this clarifies how skins works in WebWork, and how they can be
applied for various purposes.

Note also that this is merely one way to do skins. There are of course many
other ways to accomplish the same thing. This technique does not rely on any
particular feature in WebWork other than the ability to have relative page
references as result values from execute().

regards,
  Rickard