5. Design View Support

Contents > Design View Support > Composite View Design Enhancements

Facelets Composite View Support

Since Facelets is based on the Composite View Design Pattern, it's easy to create pages from reusable elements such as headers, footers, navigation menus, sidebars, and so on.

Facelets makes it easy to demarcate certain sections of a page as reusable content that can be included by other pages (or Facelets). Additionally, Facelets allows you to define content to be inserted into another Facelet using special tags to pass values between pages.

FaceletsTools fully supports Facelets composite view design and renders included Facelets, compositions, decorations, and templates in Dreamweaver as they would normally appear in the browser.

The Facelets UI Include tag is handled as a
server-side include object in Dreamweaver.

Compositions

In Facelets, a UI Composition is a tag that surrounds a section of content to be included by another Facelet. Any content outside the UI Composition tag is removed from the page.

This tag can be used effectively in Dreamweaver to create content elements that can be shared across different pages. It also has the benefit of acting as a container for child components that can be attached to the JSF component tree.

FaceletsTools provides multi-mode support for the UI Composition tag and allows you to view Facelets UI compositions in Dreamweaver as they would appear in your Web browser.

The Facelets UI Composition tag is displayed on its own page.
When this page is included by another Facelet, Dreamweaver
will only display the content inside the UI Composition tag.

Decorations

In Facelets, the UI Decorate is tag that surrounds a section of content to be wrapped by another Facelet. Any content outside of the UI Decorate tag is displayed on the page.

FaceletsTools renders Facelets UI Decorate tags in Dreamweaver's Design View as they would appear in your Web browser, allowing you to experiment with different UI designs without the overhead of leaving your design environment.

Templates

Several Facelets UI tags support the option of being associated with a template. In Facelets, a template is a document that contains markup to be included by another Facelet, and a "template client" is the document that includes a Facelets template.

FaceletsTools Professional supports Facelets templating and saves you time by allowing you to associate and edit a template with a Facelet quickly and easily through file browsing controls on Facelets UI property inspectors.