Themes

You can apply Spring Web MVC framework themes to set the overall look-and-feel of your application, thereby enhancing user experience. A theme is a collection of static resources, typically style sheets and images, that affect the visual style of the application.spring-doc.cn

as of 6.0 support for themes has been deprecated theme in favor of using CSS, and without any special support on the server side.

Defining a theme

To use themes in your web application, you must set up an implementation of the org.springframework.ui.context.ThemeSource interface. The WebApplicationContext interface extends ThemeSource but delegates its responsibilities to a dedicated implementation. By default, the delegate is an org.springframework.ui.context.support.ResourceBundleThemeSource implementation that loads properties files from the root of the classpath. To use a custom ThemeSource implementation or to configure the base name prefix of the ResourceBundleThemeSource, you can register a bean in the application context with the reserved name, themeSource. The web application context automatically detects a bean with that name and uses it.spring-doc.cn

When you use the ResourceBundleThemeSource, a theme is defined in a simple properties file. The properties file lists the resources that make up the theme, as the following example shows:spring-doc.cn

styleSheet=/themes/cool/style.css
background=/themes/cool/img/coolBg.jpg

The keys of the properties are the names that refer to the themed elements from view code. For a JSP, you typically do this using the spring:theme custom tag, which is very similar to the spring:message tag. The following JSP fragment uses the theme defined in the previous example to customize the look and feel:spring-doc.cn

<%@ taglib prefix="spring" uri="http://www.springframework.org/tags"%>
<html>
	<head>
		<link rel="stylesheet" href="<spring:theme code='styleSheet'/>" type="text/css"/>
	</head>
	<body style="background=<spring:theme code='background'/>">
		...
	</body>
</html>

By default, the ResourceBundleThemeSource uses an empty base name prefix. As a result, the properties files are loaded from the root of the classpath. Thus, you would put the cool.properties theme definition in a directory at the root of the classpath (for example, in /WEB-INF/classes). The ResourceBundleThemeSource uses the standard Java resource bundle loading mechanism, allowing for full internationalization of themes. For example, we could have a /WEB-INF/classes/cool_nl.properties that references a special background image with Dutch text on it.spring-doc.cn

Resolving Themes

After you define themes, as described in the preceding section, you decide which theme to use. The DispatcherServlet looks for a bean named themeResolver to find out which ThemeResolver implementation to use. A theme resolver works in much the same way as a LocaleResolver. It detects the theme to use for a particular request and can also alter the request’s theme. The following table describes the theme resolvers provided by Spring:spring-doc.cn

Table 1. ThemeResolver implementations
Class	Description
`FixedThemeResolver`spring-doc.cn	Selects a fixed theme, set by using the `defaultThemeName` property.spring-doc.cn
`SessionThemeResolver`spring-doc.cn	The theme is maintained in the user’s HTTP session. It needs to be set only once for each session but is not persisted between sessions.spring-doc.cn
`CookieThemeResolver`spring-doc.cn	The selected theme is stored in a cookie on the client.spring-doc.cn

Spring also provides a ThemeChangeInterceptor that lets theme changes on every request with a simple request parameter.spring-doc.cn