I want my Java application to write HTML code in a file. Right now, I am hard coding HTML tags using java.io.BufferedWriter class. For Example:
BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(file));
bw.write("<html><head><title>New Page</title></head><body><p>This is Body</p></body></html>");
bw.close();
Is there any easier way to do this, as I have to create tables and it is becoming very inconvenient?
If you want to do that yourself, without using any external library, a clean way would be to create a template.html file with all the static content, like for example:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title>$title</title>
</head>
<body>$body
</body>
</html>
Put a tag like $tag for any dynamic content and then do something like this:
File htmlTemplateFile = new File("path/template.html");
String htmlString = FileUtils.readFileToString(htmlTemplateFile);
String title = "New Page";
String body = "This is Body";
htmlString = htmlString.replace("$title", title);
htmlString = htmlString.replace("$body", body);
File newHtmlFile = new File("path/new.html");
FileUtils.writeStringToFile(newHtmlFile, htmlString);
Note: I used org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils for simplicity.
A few months ago I had the same problem and every library I found provides too much functionality and complexity for my final goal. So I end up developing my own library - HtmlFlow - that provides a very simple and intuitive API that allows me to write HTML in a fluent style. Check it here: https://github.com/fmcarvalho/HtmlFlow (it also supports dynamic binding to HTML elements)
Here is an example of binding the properties of a Task object into HTML elements. Consider a Task Java class with three properties: Title, Description and a Priority and then we can produce an HTML document for a Task object in the following way:
import htmlflow.HtmlView;
import model.Priority;
import model.Task;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.PrintStream;
public class App {
private static HtmlView<Task> taskDetailsView(){
HtmlView<Task> taskView = new HtmlView<>();
taskView
.head()
.title("Task Details")
.linkCss("https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.6/css/bootstrap.min.css");
taskView
.body().classAttr("container")
.heading(1, "Task Details")
.hr()
.div()
.text("Title: ").text(Task::getTitle)
.br()
.text("Description: ").text(Task::getDescription)
.br()
.text("Priority: ").text(Task::getPriority);
return taskView;
}
public static void main(String [] args) throws IOException{
HtmlView<Task> taskView = taskDetailsView();
Task task = new Task("Special dinner", "Have dinner with someone!", Priority.Normal);
try(PrintStream out = new PrintStream(new FileOutputStream("Task.html"))){
taskView.setPrintStream(out).write(task);
Desktop.getDesktop().browse(URI.create("Task.html"));
}
}
}
You can use jsoup or wffweb (HTML5) based.
Sample code for jsoup:-
Document doc = Jsoup.parse("<html></html>");
doc.body().addClass("body-styles-cls");
doc.body().appendElement("div");
System.out.println(doc.toString());
prints
<html>
<head></head>
<body class=" body-styles-cls">
<div></div>
</body>
</html>
Sample code for wffweb:-
Html html = new Html(null) {{
new Head(this);
new Body(this,
new ClassAttribute("body-styles-cls"));
}};
Body body = TagRepository.findOneTagAssignableToTag(Body.class, html);
body.appendChild(new Div(null));
System.out.println(html.toHtmlString());
//directly writes to file
html.toOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("/home/user/filepath/filename.html"), "UTF-8");
prints (in minified format):-
<html>
<head></head>
<body class="body-styles-cls">
<div></div>
</body>
</html>
Velocity is a good candidate for writing this kind of stuff.
It allows you to keep your html and data-generation code as separated as possible.
I would highly recommend you use a very simple templating language such as Freemarker
I had also problems in finding something simple to satisfy my needs so I decided to write my own library (with MIT license). It's mainly based on composite and builder pattern.
A basic declarative example is:
import static com.github.manliogit.javatags.lang.HtmlHelper.*;
html5(attr("lang -> en"),
head(
meta(attr("http-equiv -> Content-Type", "content -> text/html; charset=UTF-8")),
title("title"),
link(attr("href -> xxx.css", "rel -> stylesheet"))
)
).render();
A fluent example is:
ul()
.add(li("item 1"))
.add(li("item 2"))
.add(li("item 3"))
You can check more examples here
I also created an on line converter to transform every html snippet (from complex bootstrap template to simple single snippet) on the fly (i.e. html -> javatags)
It really depends on the type of HTML file you're creating.
For such tasks, I use to create an object, serialize it to XML, then transform it with XSL. The pros of this approach are:
The cons are:
<textarea/> tags (which make the page unusable), XML declaration (which can cause problems with IE), whitespace (with <pre></pre> tags etc.), HTML entities ( ), etc.Now, if your HTML is very short or very repetitive or if the HTML has a volatile structure which changes dynamically, this approach must not be taken in account. On the other hand, if you serve HTML files which have all a similar structure and you want to reduce the amount of Java code and use templates, this approach may work.
Templates and other methods based on preliminary creation of the document in memory are likely to impose certain limits on resulting document size.
Meanwhile a very straightforward and reliable write-on-the-fly approach to creation of plain HTML exists, based on a SAX handler and default XSLT transformer, the latter having intrinsic capability of HTML output:
String encoding = "UTF-8";
FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("myfile.html");
OutputStreamWriter writer = new OutputStreamWriter(fos, encoding);
StreamResult streamResult = new StreamResult(writer);
SAXTransformerFactory saxFactory =
(SAXTransformerFactory) TransformerFactory.newInstance();
TransformerHandler tHandler = saxFactory.newTransformerHandler();
tHandler.setResult(streamResult);
Transformer transformer = tHandler.getTransformer();
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.METHOD, "html");
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.ENCODING, encoding);
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
writer.write("<!DOCTYPE html>\n");
writer.flush();
tHandler.startDocument();
tHandler.startElement("", "", "html", new AttributesImpl());
tHandler.startElement("", "", "head", new AttributesImpl());
tHandler.startElement("", "", "title", new AttributesImpl());
tHandler.characters("Hello".toCharArray(), 0, 5);
tHandler.endElement("", "", "title");
tHandler.endElement("", "", "head");
tHandler.startElement("", "", "body", new AttributesImpl());
tHandler.startElement("", "", "p", new AttributesImpl());
tHandler.characters("5 > 3".toCharArray(), 0, 5); // note '>' character
tHandler.endElement("", "", "p");
tHandler.endElement("", "", "body");
tHandler.endElement("", "", "html");
tHandler.endDocument();
writer.close();
Note that XSLT transformer will release you from the burden of escaping special characters like >, as it takes necessary care of it by itself.
And it is easy to wrap SAX methods like startElement() and characters() to something more convenient to one's taste...
If you are willing to use Groovy, the MarkupBuilder is very convenient for this sort of thing, but I don't know that Java has anything like it.
http://groovy.codehaus.org/Creating+XML+using+Groovy's+MarkupBuilder
if it is becoming repetitive work ; i think you shud do code reuse ! why dont you simply write functions that "write" small building blocks of HTML. get the idea? see Eg. you can have a function to which you could pass a string and it would automatically put that into a paragraph tag and present it. Of course you would also need to write some kind of a basic parser to do this (how would the function know where to attach the paragraph!). i dont think you are a beginner .. so i am not elaborating ... do tell me if you do not understand..
Try the ujo-web library, which supports building HTML pages using the Element class. Here is a sample use case based on a Java servlet:
@WebServlet("/form-servlet")
public class FormServlet extends HttpServlet {
@Override
protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
throws IOException {
try (HtmlElement html = HtmlElement.niceOf(response, "/style.css")) {
try (Element body = html.addBody()) {
body.addHeading("Simple form");
try (Element form = body.addForm("form-inline")) {
form.addLabel("control-label").addText("Note:");
form.addInput("form-control", "col-lg-1")
.setNameValue(NOTE, NOTE.of(request));
form.addSubmitButton("btn", "btn-primary")
.addText("Submit");
}
}
}
}
enum Attrib implements HttpParameter {
NOTE;
@Override public String toString() {
return name().toLowerCase();
}
}
}
The servlet generates the next HTML code:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8"/>
<title>Demo</title>
<link href="/css/regexp.css" rel="stylesheet"/>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Simple form</h1>
<form class="form-inline">
<label class="control-label">Note:</label>
<input class="form-control col-lg-1" name="note" value=""/>
<button class="btn btn-primary" type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>
</body>
</html>
See more information here: https://ujorm.org/www/web/
