Rendering a Surf page

This example describes how to render a Surf page through Spring Web MVC.

In this example:

A request arrives to a simple SkyVault Surf application in the following form: http://localhost:8080/hotels
The Spring MVC dispatcher receives this request and tries to find a controller that matches the URI /hotels. In this case, it does not find a match. Thus, a controller is not found, nothing is invoked, and a model is not set up.
The Spring MVC dispatcher then tries to find a view resolver that can resolve views for the URI /hotels. It will walk through the available view resolvers and ask each one if it can handle this URI.
Since this is a simple Surf application, each of the Surf view resolvers are interrogated and asked whether they can resolve /hotels. The two most interesting resolvers are these:
1. PageViewResolver checks to see if there is a Surf Page object defined that maps to the URL /hotels. If so, it produces a PageView view object to render the response.
2. WebScriptViewResolver checks to see if there is a web script defined that maps to the URL /hotels. If so, it produces a WebScriptView view object to render the response.
If a PageView is produced, Surf renders back the Hotels page. If a WebScriptView is produced, Surf asks the web script engine to render back the web script matching the URI /hotels.

To render back a Hotels page that lists all the hotels available on your website, define a page in Surf that maps to the /hotels URI using the following XML. For example:
```
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> 
 <page> 
  <id>hotels</id> 
</page>
                    
```
Surf picks this up as it knows there is a page object with the URI /hotels.

Provide the template to use to render markup to the response by hardcoding in FreeMarker. For example:


<html> 
  <body> 
    <table> 
      <tr> 
        <td>Walton Cottage</td> <td>Maidenhead, UK</td> 
      </tr> 
      <tr> 
      <td>Victorian Treasure</td> <td>Lodi, WI</td> 
    </tr> 
    </table> 
  </body> 
</html>

When you hit the /hotels URI, the dispatcher walks through the view resolvers and settles on the PageViewResolver and renders your page to the browser.

Search form

Search form

You are here