How can I introspect a freemarker template to find out what variables it uses?

java freemarker
Jared picture Jared · Dec 17, 2009 · Viewed 7.9k times · Source

I'm not at all sure that this is even a solvable problem, but supposing that I have a freemarker template, I'd like to be able to ask the template what variables it uses.

For my purposes, we can assume that the freemarker template is very simple - just "root level" entries (the model for such a template could be a simple Map). In other words, I don't need to handle templates that call for nested structures, etc.

Answer

Jacek Lach picture Jacek Lach · Aug 10, 2010

This is probably late, but in case anyone else encountered this problem : you can use 'data_model' and 'globals' to inspect the model - data_model will only contain values provided by the model while globals will also contain any variables defined in the template. You need to prepend the special variables with a dot - so to access globals, use ${.globals}

For other special variables see http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/docs/ref_specvar.html

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