How the view generator creates view classes

When you build a theme, the view generator executes the following steps:

1. Open the file styleguide/_config.json and look up the value for javaPackage. This value is the first component of the package name for the generated view files. Assign this value to <package>.
2. Loop through each JSON file in the directory /styleguide/. For each file—
   
   1. Check for the existence of a _template key. If not found, continue to the next JSON file.
   2. Copy the file’s path, and duplicate the path under the directory target/generated-sources/styleguide/.
   3. In the JSON file, look up the value for _template, and extract the base name (file name without the hbs extension). Assign this value to <base>.
   4. Create a new class file View.java in the path from step b.
   5. Declare the class’s package as package <package>.<currentpath>, where  reflects the path from /styleguide/ to the current file.Each key inside the JSON file not starting with an underscore is assumed to be a displayed field. For each such key—
      
      1. Create a constructor inside the file View.java.
      2. Create a getter inside the file View.java. (At runtime, the getters populate the corresponding field in the template.)

Suppose you want to create a view for articles. Your theme files may look as follows:

_config.json

Data file specifying package name

{
    "javaPackage" : "brightspotnews"
}

Article.hbs

Template

<div class="Article">
    <div class="Article-headline">
        {{headline}}
    </div>
    <div class="Article-body">
        {{body}}
    </div>
    <div class="Article-image">
        <img src="{{image}}" alt="Alternate Text" />
    </div>
</div>

Article.json

Data file specifying associated template and source for method names

{
  "_template": "path/to/Article.hbs",
  "headline": "{{words(4)}}",
  "body": "{{paragraphs(2, 5, 15)}}",
  "image": "{{image(200, 200)}}"
}

Resulting file structure

The following diagram shows your directory structure after building the Brightspot project; the gray shading indicates those directories and files Brightspot created based on the data files.

Resulting interface ArticleView.java

This file is a Java interface automatically generated by Brightspot’s view generator.

package brightspotnews.content.article; 

/* Imports */

/* Various annotations */

public interface ArticleView { 

    CharSequence getHeadline(); 

    CharSequence getBody();

    CharSequence getImage();

}

See also:

• Generating Java view interfaces from data files