Quick Velocity Template Example

[Oralloy]

Folks,

A co-worker and I are writing plug-ins for the Atlassian tools JIRA and Confluence.

Our plug-ins for JIRA are using Velocity (see http://org.apache.velocity) templates effectively. The "Report" object I'm using implicitly loads the template and generally hides Velocity from me, so all we have to do is populate a Map<String, Object> name/value pairs and write the supporting Velocity template.

Unfortunately for Confluence, we're stuck with a model which does not implicitly invoke a template. I've been trying to find an example in the on-line developers code base that does what I'd like, but so far I'm batting zero.

The basic problem is that I really don't understand in-depth how things wire together, so we're stuck programming by copy/example at the moment. This is very frustrating, but we'll get past it.

In the meanwhile, is there a method that I can use to process a Velocity template in-line in the code and get the resulting string? Once I have the string, it's easy enough to plug it into the Confluence output stream and display whatever I want.

I'm pretty certain that the answer is three lines of code, please help by filling in the blanks ....

Map<String, Object> values = new Map<String, Object>;
values.add("name1", object1);
values.add("name2", object2);
 
String templateBody = lookupResource("template-id");
 
VelocityTemplate template = new VelocityTemplate(templateBody);
 
String result = template.apply(values);
 

Thanks for your help,
Oralloy

[Oralloy]

And some days we eventually come to a solution.

For anyone who may need it:

import org.apache.velocity.app.Velocity;
import org.apache.velocity.VelocityContext;
import org.apache.velocity.Template;
 
import java.io.*;
import java.util.ArrayList;
 
public class SimpleInstance {
  final String propertyFile = "SimpleInstance.properties";
  final String templateFile = "SimpleInstance.vm";
 
  public static void main(String[] argv) {
    try {
      Velocity.init();
      Velocity.init(propertyFile);
 
      VelocityContext context = new VelocityContext();
      String value = "value string";
      context.put("value", value);
 
      Template template =  Velocity.getTemplate(templateFile);
 
      BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(System.out));
      template.merge(context, out);
    }
    catch(Exception exception) {
      exception.printStackTrace();
    }
  }
}

Cheers!