Lift templates contain no executable code. They are pure, raw, valid HTML. Lift uses snippets to transform sections of the HTML page from static to dynamic. The key word is transform.
The eniLINK platform makes use of the
Lift web framework for its web templates.
Lift itself is written in Scala, an object-oriented
and functional programming language that runs in the JVM.
David Pollak, Lift’s creator, describes its properties in Simply Lift:
Lift templates contain no executable code. They are pure, raw, valid HTML. Lift uses snippets to transform sections of the HTML page from static to dynamic. The key word is transform.
In contrast to many other templating systems, the transformation doesn’t concatenate string contents, but works on sequences of XML nodes that it transforms from input to output using Snippets. Snippets are Scala code that is referenced from, but not included in, the templates (hence: no executable code).
Think of a Lift page template using Snippets as a collection of components that generate parts of the final page.
As mentioned, Lift templates simply consist of (X)HTML tags.
This does not mean that a lift template will be a complete document with
<html></html> blocks or other Chrome, like David Pollak calls it.
Instead, there typically is a default template with all of the common markup
while the page template will just contain markup for its actual content.
<div data-lift="surround?with=default;at=content" />This would create a page with decorations and other elements as specified in the default template (think CSS and scripts, like Bootstrap, jQuery etc.) but otherwise empty.
|
Note
|
Lift makes heavy use of data-* attributes to convey parameters to the
snippets. The attribute data-lift, specifically, tells Lift which snippet
is to be invoked.
|
In a nutshell, Lift templates combine basic tags with certain attributes that instruct Lift to invoke appropriate Snippets, which transform the tag body or content into the final output. The snippets are free to replace the entire tag with other markup, but they can also just add, replace, or repeat pieces.
Lets start with a very simple example.
<html>
<body>
<div id="example-1" class="example" data-lift="ExampleSnippet"></div>
</body>
</html>This will invoke the method render(in: NodeSeq): NodeSeq of the class
ExampleSnippet with the full <div/> tag as input XML node sequence in,
and generate the output from whatever the method returns as its result.
If we go for the most straight-forward implementation possible, and just return whatever input we receive, …
import scala.xml.NodeSeq
class ExampleSnippet {
def render(in: NodeSeq): NodeSeq = {
in
}
}... the result will basically be the same page (with maybe a bit of
re-formatting and some Lift AJAX helpers) with the div still being there,
having all the same attributes and values (with the exception of data-lift
itself).
Of course, what we actually want to do is to place dynamic content onto the page by transforming parts of the templates.
Consider this example, slightly modified from Simply Lift:
<span class="time" data-lift="CurrentTime">The time is <span id="current-time">current time</span>.</span>Along with the following snippet class (see CSS transforms), …
import java.util.Date
import net.liftweb.util.Helpers._
class CurrentTime {
def render = "#current-time" #> (new Date).toString
}... this will replace the inner span element, completely, with a string representation of the time the page was requested at:
<span class="time">The time is Wed Nov 02 17:39:19 CET 2016.</span>A very important and powerful part of the eniLINK Lift template system is its support for using RDFa annotations to query the underlying triplestore and put the query results into the resulting pages.
The RDFa support is implemented with a Snippet, Rdfa, and as such works on the principles outlined above. It offers a lot of possibilities, and has its own documentation, which you can continue reading here.