/ FREEMARKER

Freemarker not Displaying

I’m putting together a simple web page and trying to learn more about Freemarker. I’ve setup my views for the project like this:

  • views
    • global
      • base.ftl
      • footer.ftl
      • header.ftl
      • navigation.ftl
    • user
      • new-user.ftl
      • view-user.ftl
    • index.ftl

The base.ftl file is the skeleton page layout which includes the header, content, navigation, and footer.

<#macro myLayout> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <body> <#include "header.ftl"/> <#nested/> <#include "navigation.ftl"/> <#include "footer.ftl"/></div> </body> </html> </#macro>

The problem was the navigation wasn’t showing on my new-user.ftl page. It showed with no problems on the index page. The logfile said:

freemarker.core.InvalidReferenceException: Expression username is undefined on line 18, column 87 in user/new-user.ftl.

Sure enough, I was calling for a model attribute that I hadn’t defined. The navigation wasn’t showing because the base.ftl file calls the details before the navigation. The fix is to use the attempt keyword and provide default content. Here is the fix:

<#macro myLayout> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <body> <#include "header.ftl"/> <#attempt> <#nested/> <#recover> Failed to load content </#attempt> <#include "navigation.ftl"/> <#include "footer.ftl"/></div> </body> </html> </#macro>