TinyTemplate User Guide

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Download
  3. Installation
  4. Usage
  5. Extending TinyTemplate
  6. Comparison with other templating engines

Introduction

TinyTemplate is a small single-file templating engine in Java with no dependencies. A PHP version is also available.

License: GPLv3

Download

You can download TinyTemplate from Sourceforge.

You can also download the current development versions directly from the code repository.

Installation

Java: copy net/sf/tinytemplate/Template.java to your source directory.

PHP: copy tinytemplate.php to your website.

Usage

Java:

...
include java.util.Map;
include net.sf.tinytemplate.Template;
...
  String template = ...
  Map<String,Object> variables = ...
  String text = new Template(template).process(variables);
...

You can use the static helper functions to load the template string:

...
  // from a URL
  String template1 = Template.from(new URL("http://localhost/index.html"));
  // from a resource URL
  String template2 = Template.from(this.getClass().getResource('/index.html'));
  // from a resource stream
  String template3 = Template.from(this.getClass().getResourceAsStream('/index.html'), 'UTF-8');
  // from a file
  String template4 = Template.from(new File("/var/www/index.template"));
...

PHP:

...
require_once('tinytemplate.php');
...
  $template = ...
  $variables = array(...);
  $t = new Template($template);
  $text = $t->process($variables);
...

Template Tags

Conditions:

    {{if value}} ... {{else}} ... {{end}}
    {{if ! value}} ... {{else}} ... {{end}}
    {{if value1 == value2}} ... {{else}} ... {{end}}
    {{if value1 != value2}} ... {{else}} ... {{end}}
    {{if value1 <= value2}} ... {{else}} ... {{end}}
    {{if value1 >= value2}} ... {{else}} ... {{end}}
    {{if value1 < value2}} ... {{else}} ... {{end}}
    {{if value1 > value2}} ... {{else}} ... {{end}}

The else is optional.

The first two conditions return true, if the value is not empty (null, empty string, empty array/map/list) or empty, respectively.

Loops:

    {{foreach var in value}} ... {{end}}

The value must be an array, collection, map or iterable, var is a variable name, which can be used within the loop.

Output values:

    {{value}}
    {{value defaultvalue}}
    {{value defaultvalue formatvalue}}

This outputs the value. If the value is null/empty, the defaultvalue is output. If the value is a number or date and a formatvalue is given, the value is formatted (currently only in Java, formatting see DecimalFormat and SimpleDateFormat).

Values:

Values can be literals or variables, even nested variables, e.g.

Extending TinyTemplate

TinyTemplate is easily extensible by extending the class.

New conditions

Override boolean processCondition(Map variables, String[] condition).

Different tag format

Override Pattern getTagPattern(), depending on the format also String getTagName(Matcher m) and String[] getTagParams(Matcher m).

New Tags

Create new implementations of Part and override Part parseTag(String template, Matcher m) returning these new Parts.

New format patterns

Override String format(Object object, String format).

Comparison with other templating engines

TinyTemplate