Which is the best Wicket component for rendering arbitrary HTML?

Question

I am implementing a simple markdown wiki using Apache Wicket. The wiki would typically render any arbitrary HTML based on what the user has entered.

I am a bit confused about which Wicket component would be best suited to render such arbitrary HTML.

I tried the Label component but it does not render lists properly, neither does the MultilineLabel (which puts breaks instead of the regular list HTML).

Thanks for any help.

UPDATE: The Label component works perfectly. It was my mistake that I was not able to get it to work earlier. It was a combination of some bad stylesheets and late night coding. Thanks for the helpfull answers. As suggested, I am also going to check out some WYSIWYG editors, which actually might work out better than markdown. Visural Wicket seems especially promising.

score 14 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 17 '11 at 12:43

If what you want to render is not big, or is already represented as a String, Label will work well, just call label.setEscapeModelStrings(false); to ensure it prints the string as is.

But, if your HTML content is generated dynamically, or read from an InputStream/Reader, and you don't want to keep it in memory, you could use WebComponent directly, and override the method onComponentTagBody(). This way, you write directly to the response, instead of filling a in-memory buffer, transform it to a String, and then write to the response (which happens if you use Label).

Sample code, for both cases:

HomePage.java

public class HomePage extends WebPage {

    public HomePage() {

        add(new Label("label", "<ul><li>test</li><li>test</li><li>test</li><li>test</li><li>test</li></ul>")
            .setEscapeModelStrings(false));

        add(new WebComponent("html") {
            @Override
            protected void onComponentTagBody(MarkupStream markupStream, ComponentTag openTag) {
                Response response = getRequestCycle().getResponse();
                response.write("<ul>");
                for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++)
                    response.write("<li>test</li>");
                response.write("</ul>");
            }
        });
    }
}

HomePage.html

<html xmlns:wicket="http://wicket.apache.org">
<body>
  <h2>Label</h2>
  <div wicket:id="label"></div>
  <h2>WebComponent</h2>
  <div wicket:id="html"></div>
</body>
</html>

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 17 '11 at 11:27

4

It is Label, call Component.setEscapeModelStrings(false) though to render the raw html your model returns.

answered Jan 17 '11 at 11:27

biziclop

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oh, you were faster :) ... @Parag: Did you looked out for an already existing editor? – Karussell Jan 17 '11 at 11:28
I tried using Label with setEscapeModel(false). It renders most things properly, but not lists. – Parag Jan 17 '11 at 11:37
@Karussell, I tried searching for Wicket editors, but could not find any. – Parag Jan 17 '11 at 11:42
do you need markdown? for wysiwyg take a look at http://wicket.visural.net/examples/app/rich-text-editor http://wicketbyexample.com/wicket-tinymce-some-advanced-tips/ http://wicketstuff.org/confluence/display/STUFFWIKI/wicket-contrib-tinymce – Karussell Jan 17 '11 at 13:41
@Karussell Thanks for sharing the links, Visural Wicket looks very promising. – Parag Jan 18 '11 at 13:18

Which is the best Wicket component for rendering arbitrary HTML?

2 Answers2