Dropwizard Views

The dropwizard-views-mustache & dropwizard-views-freemarker modules provide you with simple, fast HTML views using either FreeMarker or Mustache.

To enable views for your Application, add the ViewBundle in the initialize method of your Application class:

public void initialize(Bootstrap<MyConfiguration> bootstrap) {
    bootstrap.addBundle(new ViewBundle<MyConfiguration>());
}

You can pass configuration through to view renderers by overriding getViewConfiguration:

public void initialize(Bootstrap<MyConfiguration> bootstrap) {
    bootstrap.addBundle(new ViewBundle<MyConfiguration>() {
        @Override
        public Map<String, Map<String, String>> getViewConfiguration(MyConfiguration config) {
            return config.getViewRendererConfiguration();
        }
    });
}

The returned map should have, for each extension (such as .ftl), a Map<String, String> describing how to configure the renderer. Specific keys and their meanings can be found in the FreeMarker and Mustache documentation:

views:
  .ftl:
    strict_syntax: yes

Then, in your resource method, add a View class:

public class PersonView extends View {
    private final Person person;

    public PersonView(Person person) {
        super("person.ftl");
        this.person = person;
    }

    public Person getPerson() {
        return person;
    }
}

person.ftl is the path of the template relative to the class name. If this class was com.example.service.PersonView, Dropwizard would then look for the file src/main/resources/com/example/service/person.ftl.

If your template ends with .ftl, it’ll be interpreted as a FreeMarker template. If it ends with .mustache, it’ll be interpreted as a Mustache template.

Tip

Dropwizard Freemarker Views also support localized template files. It picks up the client’s locale from their Accept-Language, so you can add a French template in person_fr.ftl or a Canadian template in person_en_CA.ftl.

Your template file might look something like this:

<#-- @ftlvariable name="" type="com.example.views.PersonView" -->
<html>
    <body>
        <!-- calls getPerson().getName() and sanitizes it -->
        <h1>Hello, ${person.name?html}!</h1>
    </body>
</html>

The @ftlvariable lets FreeMarker (and any FreeMarker IDE plugins you may be using) know that the root object is a com.example.views.PersonView instance. If you attempt to call a property which doesn’t exist on PersonView – getConnectionPool(), for example – it will flag that line in your IDE.

Once you have your view and template, you can simply return an instance of your View subclass:

@Path("/people/{id}")
@Produces(MediaType.TEXT_HTML)
public class PersonResource {
    private final PersonDAO dao;

    public PersonResource(PersonDAO dao) {
        this.dao = dao;
    }

    @GET
    public PersonView getPerson(@PathParam("id") String id) {
        return new PersonView(dao.find(id));
    }
}

Tip

Jackson can also serialize your views, allowing you to serve both text/html and application/json with a single representation class.

For more information on how to use FreeMarker, see the FreeMarker documentation.

For more information on how to use Mustache, see the Mustache and Mustache.java documentation.

Template Errors

If there is an error with the template (eg. the template file is not found or there is a compilation error with the template), the user will receive a 500 Internal Sever Error with a generic HTML message. The exact error will logged under error mode.