ZK Developer's Reference/UI Composing/ZUML/Include a Page

apply (recommended)

If you are using ZK 8, we suggest you using <apply> instead of Include. Comparing to Include, it has several advantages:

1. Doesn't consume extra memory.

   Because it's a shadow element, it doesn't create a corresponding component at the server side.

2. Doesn't render an extra
   surrounding its child components at the client-side.

   Include renders a

   to enclose its child components. Sometimes the outer

   breaks the layout.

3. Doesn't create an ID space.

   Include itself is an ID space owner.

4. It can render its child components upon parameters dynamically.

   You can pass a parameter with data binding and bind to the parameter. When the parameter's value changes, the content will changed accordingly.

Include

Include allows you to include a ZUML page, a static page, a JSP page or the result of a servlet. For example,

<include src="another.zul"/>
<include src="another.jsp"/>

When including a non-ZUML page (such as JSP), the output of the page will be the content of the Include component. Thus, the output must be a valid HTML fragment.

When including a ZUML page, the components specified in the ZUML page will become the child components of the Include component.

For example, suppose we have two ZUL pages as follows:

<!-- first.zul -->
<include src="second.zul"/>

and

<!-- second.zul -->
<listbox>
    <listitem label="foo"/>
</listbox>

Then, listbox in second.zul will become the child of include in first.zul.

If you prefer to create an independent page (Page), or want to include a page rendered by Richlet while the value of src ends with .zul or .zhtml, you could specify the mode with defer (Include.setMode(String)). Then, include won't have any child. Rather, an instance of Page will be created to hold the content of second.zul or the content generated by Richlet. For more information, please refer to ZK Component Reference: include.

Classpath Web Resource Path

ZK provides a special path URL starting with ~./, it looks for a file under a folder starting with web in a web application's classpath, e.g. my-module.jar/web/. So it will get a file under the path among all included jar. You can specify such URL in a component path related attribute like:

<?component name="another" templateURI="~./another.zul" ?>
<zk>
	<vlayout>
		apply templateURI:
		<apply templateURI="~./another.zul" />

		component directive:
		<another/>
		
		image src:
		<image src="~./zklogo.png" />
	</vlayout>
</zk>

It can be used as a default shared folder path for a jar. When you create a sub-module project, you can put some shared resources or reusable template zul files under this folder. Then, package the sub-module as a jar and include the sub-module jar in the main project. The main project can easily access those reusable resources by this special URL. Notice that the zul files under this special resource path are public accessed with a URL in a browser, you should not put any sensitive data in it.

Application-wide Named <Apply>

If you prefer to an application-wide named <apply> element with a predefined templateURI and default parameters, you could specify it in a language addon. For example, we could prepare a file called WEB-INF/lang-addon.xml with the following content:

<language-addon>
	<addon-name>myapp</addon-name>
	<language-name>xul/html</language-name>
	<component>
		<component-name>mytemplatecomp</component-name>
		<template-uri>~./template/mytemplate.zul<template-uri>
	</component>
</language-addon>

Then, we could specify this file by adding the following content to WEB-INF/zk.xml:

	<language-config>
		<addon-uri>/WEB-INF/lang-addon.xml</addon-uri>
	</language-config>

For more information, please refer to ZK Configuration Reference.

Version History

Version	Date	Content
8.0.3	2016/09/22	Application-wide <Apply>