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Thymeleaf Layout Dialect

Thymeleaf Layout Dialect

A dialect for Thymeleaf that lets you build layouts and reusable templates in order to improve code reuse.

On this page

  1. What does it do?
  2. Learn more

What does it do?

The Thymeleaf Layout Dialect adds the ability to decorate templates - automatically for the <head> section of an HTML template, and explicitly through extension points that developers can add to their templates. This all adds up to create layouts that can be extended in a manner similar to classical inheritence.

For example, given a common layout.html file, set some shared static assets in the <head> and define extension points in the body with the layout:fragment processor:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns:layout="http://www.ultraq.net.nz/thymeleaf/layout">
<head>
  <title>Layout page</title>
  <script src="common-script.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
  <header>
    <h1>My website</h1>
  </header>
  <section layout:fragment="content">
    <p>Page content goes here</p>
  </section>
</body>
</html>

Create a content template that will define its own title, static resources, and replacements for those extension points. Link the page to the layout by using the layout:decorate processor at the root element of the page which will instruct Thymeleaf to decorate the layout with this template:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns:layout="http://www.ultraq.net.nz/thymeleaf/layout"
  layout:decorate="~{layout.html}">
<head>
  <title>Content page</title>
  <script src="content-script.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
  <section layout:fragment="content">
    <p>This is a paragraph from the content page</p>
  </section>
</body>
</html>

When Thymeleaf processes your content template, the resulting HTML will be:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>Content page</title>
  <script src="common-script.js"></script>
  <script src="content-script.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
  <header>
    <h1>My website</h1>
  </header>
  <section>
    <p>This is a paragraph from the content page</p>
  </section>
</body>
</html>

Learn more

Check out the getting started guide to learn how to add the layout dialect to your Thymeleaf project, or the processors pages for in-depth examples of each of the layout dialect features and how they can help you build your templates.