Thymeleaf - Eclipse Plugin module
A plugin for the Eclipse IDE to add content assist features for the Thymeleaf standard dialect processors and expression utility objects, using the Eclipse Web Tools Platform HTML source editor.
Minimum Requirements
- Java 8
- An Eclipse IDE based on 2019-06 or newer
This plugin has been tested with the Enterprise and Java Web Developers bundle from the Eclipse installer and Spring Tool Suite 4.7.1. STS 4.8.0+ changed the HTML editor this plugin is built atop, so it isn't guaranteed to work in those versions. However, some people have reported it still works for them so your mileage may vary.
- A Thymeleaf 3 project
Installation
This plugin is available on the Eclipse Marketplace. Searching for "thymeleaf" in the marketplace website or client from Eclipse will bring up this plugin for installation.
Alternatively, you can install this plugin using the update site URL: https://www.thymeleaf.org/eclipse-plugin-update-site/
Or, download a ZIP archive of the plugin from the releases pages.
Features
Content Assist
Content assist features are only available for dialects which have supplied special dialect metadata files in their JARs. thymeleaf, thymeleaf-spring, thymeleaf-extras-springsecurity, and thymeleaf-extras-tiles2 projects already have such files. Other dialects, however, are up to the discretion of their developers. If you're developing a Thymeleaf dialect and would like to take advantage of content assist for your own dialect, read the section on adding content assist for your dialect.
Once those help files are available, and that the JAR is in the classpath of the project, you can make content assist available in your HTML files through 1 of 2 ways:
1. Declaring the dialect namespace and prefix in your HTML files
This is the easiest method and you may have already done this to keep the XML validator happy:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org">2. Applying the Thymeleaf project nature to your project
This method will make content assist available to all of the HTML files in your project, and is ideal for when you've organized your code to have plenty of reusable HTML fragments without a common root element on which to put the XML namespace.
To add the Thymeleaf nature to your project: right-click a project >> Thymeleaf >> Add Thymeleaf Nature.
Using either method, you should now start getting content assist for any dialect whose namespace is explicitly declared in your HTML files (method 1), or for every dialect in your project's classpath (method 2). This applies to suggestions as you type, autocompletion of what you've entered so far if it matches only one result (both of these can be invoked manually using CTRL+SPACE), and help text when hovering the cursor over a Thymeleaf processor.
Adding content assist for your dialect
The content assist features are driven by metadata about a dialect, currently done using XML files, conforming to a schema that lives at https://www.thymeleaf.org/xsd/thymeleaf-extras-dialect-2.1.xsd.
When content assist is invoked, this plugin will look for XML files in the
classpath of the current project whose XML namespace is http://www.thymeleaf.org/extras/dialect.
If such a file is found, it is loaded and the information in it is used to form
the content assist data that the Eclipse plugin uses.
Dialect developers can take advantage of this by including XML help files as part of their dialect JARs. All you need to do is create an XML file that conforms to the schema above, then bundle that XML file with your JAR.
Some notes on where you put that file in the JAR:
- it cannot go in the default package
- the directory it goes in must be a valid Java package name
These are just short-comings of the current dialect scanning method, which itself is built upon Eclipse's own lookup mechanisms.