Which is the best Wicket component for rendering arbitrary HTML?
I am implementing a simple markdown wiki using Apache Wicket. The wiki would typically render any arbitrary HTML based on what the user has entered.
I am a bit confused about which Wicket component would be best suited to render such arbitrary HTML.
I tried the Label component but it does not render lists properly, neither does the MultilineLabel (which puts breaks instead of the regular list HTML).
Thanks for any help.
UPDATE: The Label component works perfectly. It was my mistake that I was not able to get it to work earlier. It was a combination of some bad stylesheets and late night coding. Thanks for the helpfull answers. As suggested, I am also going to check out some WYSIWYG editors, which actually might work out better than markdown. Visural Wicket seems especially promising.
Answer
If what you want to render is not big, or is already represented as a String, Label will work well, just call label.setEscapeModelStrings(false); to ensure it prints the string as is.
But, if your HTML content is generated dynamically, or read from an InputStream/Reader, and you don't want to keep it in memory, you could use WebComponent directly, and override the method onComponentTagBody(). This way, you write directly to the response, instead of filling a in-memory buffer, transform it to a String, and then write to the response (which happens if you use Label).
Sample code, for both cases:
HomePage.java
public class HomePage extends WebPage {
public HomePage() {
add(new Label("label", "<ul><li>test</li><li>test</li><li>test</li><li>test</li><li>test</li></ul>")
.setEscapeModelStrings(false));
add(new WebComponent("html") {
@Override
protected void onComponentTagBody(MarkupStream markupStream, ComponentTag openTag) {
Response response = getRequestCycle().getResponse();
response.write("<ul>");
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++)
response.write("<li>test</li>");
response.write("</ul>");
}
});
}
}
HomePage.html
<html xmlns:wicket="http://wicket.apache.org">
<body>
<h2>Label</h2>
<div wicket:id="label"></div>
<h2>WebComponent</h2>
<div wicket:id="html"></div>
</body>
</html>