Thymeleaf & Spring MVC Current Controller & Action

Question

I have some navigation in one of my thymeleaf templates.

<li class="active"><a th:href="@{/}">Home</a></li>
<li class=""><a th:href="@{/about}">About</a></li>
<li class=""><a th:href="@{/contact}">Contact</a></li>

What I want to do is set the active class of the current navigation item that we are on. Coming from the grails world we can do this easily because there are 2 very important variables available to us in a GSP.

${controllerName}
${actionName}

Now I know that I can manually setting these variables in my Spring MVC controller and passing them to the view but this does not seem like a good solution.

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/about")
public class AboutController {

    @RequestMapping("/")
    public String home(Model model) {
        model.addAttribute("controllerName", "about");
        model.addAttribute("actionName", "home");        
        return "about/home";        
    }

}

Any other way to do this?

The only way that i know which is not custom variables based is described here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10852131/how-to-get-the-mapped-url-from-controller-name-action-name-in-springmvc . But it's still kind of a manual way. — Rozart, Jan 14 '16 at 13:17
That is what I thought. I was using something like this but I was just checking to see if there is an easier way. I might try and create a base interceptor and add 2 variables to every request.
Well I am afraid that there is no such thing similar to the one in Grails. Additionally i am not so sure if `

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:04

I wrote out a different solution using variables set in the page template itself.

see here: Is it possible to pass parameters to layout in thymeleaf layout-dialect?

my home.html file would be the equivalent to your about/home template. I set a variable (currentPage) making it available to all other includes.

It's still a manual method, as seen in my fragments/header.html file, but at least all that logic stays on the template side.

You could argue either case for this since the controller decides which template to use for each page. But it's a simple solution and you don't have to keep adding this data to your model just to keep track of which nav element to highlight.

Thymeleaf & Spring MVC Current Controller & Action

1 Answers1