Templating

Mangoo I/O leverages Freemarker for rendering HTML pages.

Template Variables

Mangoo I/O provides several default variables automatically assigned to templates, offering useful functionality out of the box:

Form
Flash
Session
i18n
Route
Location
Prettytime

Note

These variable names cannot be passed into a template manually. Assigning a variable with the same name in your controller would overwrite the built-in ones, leading to rendering failures and exceptions.

Pretty Time

Pretty Time allows you to format localized relative dates dynamically. For example, a date representing "yesterday" would be formatted as "1 day ago" based on the request's preferred locale.

Usage

${prettytime(localDateTime)}  // Based on LocalDateTime
${prettytime(localDate)}      // Based on LocalDate
${prettytime(date)}           // Based on Date

Location

Location helps determine the current URL accessing the template. This is useful for dynamic navigation highlighting.

Usage

<#if location("ApplicationController:location")>DO SOMETHING</#if>

To validate the above, provide the Controller and method. The check is case-insensitive.

Route

Route enables reverse routing, allowing URLs to be dynamically generated instead of being hardcoded. This ensures that links always align with mapped controller methods.

Basic Usage

<a href="${route("ApplicationController:route")}">Route</a>

If ApplicationController.class contains a method route() mapped to /route, the above will render as:

<a href="/route">Route</a>

Passing Attributes

You can pass additional attributes to the function:

<a href="${route("ApplicationController:route", "foo")}">Route</a>

This outputs:

<a href="/route/foo">Route</a>