ZK Developer's Reference/Annotations/Annotate in ZUML

Annotations can be applied to the declarations of components and properties in ZUML pages.

Annotate Properties

To annotate a property, you could specify an annotation expression as the value of the property. In other words, if the value of the property is an annotation expression, it is considered as an annotation for the property, rather than a value to be assigned.

The format of an annotation expression:

@annotation-name ()
@annotation-name ( attr-name1 = attr-value1, attr-name2 = attr-value2 )
@annotation-name ( attr-name1 = { attr-value1-1, attr-value1-2 }, attr-name2 = attr-value2 )

As shown, an annotation consists of an annotation name and any number of attributes, and an attribute consists of an attribute name and an attribute value. The name of an annotation must start with a letter ('a' - 'z' or 'A' - 'Z'), an underscore ('_'), or a dollar sign ('$').

If an attribute has multiple values, these values have to be enclosed with the curly braces (as shown in the third format).

For example,

<listitem label="@bind(datasource='author',value='selected')"/>

where an annotation called bind is annotated to the label property, and the bind annotation has two attributes: datasource and value.

If the attribute name is not specified, the name is assumed to be value. For example, the following two statements are equivalent:

<textbox value="@bind(vm.p1.firstName)"/>
<textbox value="@bind(value=vm.p1.firstName)"/>

Here is a more complex example.

<textbox value="@save(vm.person.firstName,  before={'cmd1', 'cmd2'})"/>

where it annotates the value property with an annotation named save, and the annotation has two attributes: value and before. The value of the before attribute is a two-element array: 'cmd1' and 'cmd2'. Notice that the quotations, ' and ", will be preserved, so they will be retrieved exactly the same as they are specified in the ZUML document.

To annotate the same property with multiple annotations, you could specify them one-by-one and separate them with a space, as shown below.

<textbox value="@bind(vm.value1) @validator('validator1')" errorMessage="@bind(vm.lastMessage1)" />

In additions, you could annotate with multiple annotations that have the same name. For example,

<textbox value="@bind(vm.first) @bind(vm.second)"/>

where two annotations are annotated to the value property.

Annotate Components

To annotate a component, you could specify an annotation expression in a specific attribute called self as shown below.

<label self="@title(value='Hello World')"/>

where self is a keyword to denote the annotation which is used to annotate the component declaration, rather than any property.

The annotation Namespace

ZK Loader detects the annotation automatically. However, it may not be what in you expect. Here we discuss how to resolve these conflicts.

Specify both value and annotation

If you'd like to specify both the value and the annotations of a given property, you could specify a namespace called annotation to distinguish them. For example,

<textbox value="a property's value" a:value="@save(vm.user)" xmlns:a="annotation"/>

Then, the textbox's value property will be assigned with a value, "a property's value", and an annotation, @save(vm.user).

Specify a value that looks like an annotation

If the value of a property looks like an annotation, you could specify a namespace other than annotation to tell ZK Loader not to interpret it as an annotation. For example,

<textbox u:value="@value()" xmlns:u="zul"/>

Then, @value() will be considered as a value rather an annotation, and assigned to the textbox's value property directly.

Version History

Version	Date	Content
6.0.0	December 2011	The new syntax was introduced. For ZK 5's syntax, please refer to ZK 5's Developer's Reference. Though not recommended, it is OK to use ZK 5's syntax in ZK 6.