Spring MVC with SiteMesh Decoration Framework and Velocity Templates

Most developers hate to repeat themselves, so they like to reuse as much code as possible. The folks at OpenSymphony.org who also brought you Quartz developed Sitemesh to utilize the Gang of Four pattern composition.
In short, SiteMesh is a web-page layout and decoration framework. It allows you to
reuse your layouts (header and footer for example) throughout your site, so that
you site has a consistent look and feel.

The general documentation at the SiteMesh Site site is quite good but I needed to utilize Sitemesh in the following specific scenario, I am using Spring MVC and Velocity Templates.

Since the general install documentation, installation instructions is very good, I will not repeat it here. Once you have downloaded and setup your web project, you will have 3 xml config that you will be dealing with, web.xml, sitemesh.xml, and decorators.xml. In my case I am using Spring MVC and Velocity, so I need to customize my web.xml configuration to handle this setup. Here is how my web.xml is configured:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app version="2.4"
xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">

<display-name>EnduroTracker</display-name>

<context-param>
<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
<param-value>/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml
</param-value>
</context-param>

<listener>
<listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>


<!--SiteMesh-->
<filter>
<filter-name>sitemesh</filter-name>
<filter-class>com.opensymphony.sitemesh.webapp.SiteMeshFilter</filter-class>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>sitemesh</filter-name>
<url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern>
<dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher>
<dispatcher>FORWARD</dispatcher>
</filter-mapping>

<!--Used to Enable Spring MVC -->
<servlet>
<servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

<!--Sitemesh-->
<servlet>
<servlet-name>sitemesh-velocity</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>com.opensymphony.module.sitemesh.velocity.VelocityDecoratorServlet</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>2</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>sitemesh-velocity</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.vm</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>


<welcome-file-list>
<welcome-file>homeIndex.html</welcome-file>
</welcome-file-list>

<error-page>
<error-code>500</error-code>
<location>/error.html</location>
</error-page>

</web-app>

If you followed the SiteMesh Install steps at their site and then customized your
web.xml for your Spring MVC web project, you should now have SiteMesh configured correctly to use with Spring MVC and Velocity.
Important to note in your decorators.xml since you are using Velocity,
you will be using *.vm decorator files, here is an example decorators.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<decorators defaultdir="/decorators">
<!-- Any urls that are excluded will never be decorated by Sitemesh -->
<!--<excludes>
<pattern>/exclude.vm</pattern>
<pattern>/exclude/*</pattern>
</excludes>-->

<decorator name="default" page="default.vm">
<pattern>/*</pattern>
</decorator>

</decorators>