Web templating (struts tiles) - best solution to indicate current page?

Question

I would like to indicate the currently chosen page in a shared menu component of a web page in a Struts Tiles project.

I can think of some possible solutions

• check current URL
• call some Javascript to indicate
• possibly hooked into the tiles or struts config files and read.

I'm sure this problem has been faced many times before. What is the best way of dealing with this?

Answer 1

Did you consider using struts-menu? It integrates nicely with Tiles if I remember well.

Answer 2

I used the following method:

tiles-des.xml

    <definition name=".basic.layout" path="/WEB-INF/jsps/basicLayout.jsp">
        <put name="title" value=""/>
        <put name="homeMenuClass" value=""/>
        <put name="forumMenuClass" value=""/>
        <put name="helpMenuClass" value=""/>
    </definition>

And in the same file set the appropriate menu class to "active" for differing tiles.

basicLayout.jsp

    <li class="<tiles:getAsString name="homeMenuClass"/>">...
    <li class="<tiles:getAsString name="forumMenuClass"/>">...
    <li class="<tiles:getAsString name="helpMenuClass"/>">...