Migrating to 4.0

Version 4.0 of the layout dialect is made to align with Spring Boot 4’s build and dependency targets, and so is built for Java 17, Groovy 5, and Gradle 9 (for building the project).

On this page

1. Adopt Spring Boot 4 targets
2. Deprecated layout:collect processor has been deleted
3. The configuration constructors have been deprecated

Adopt Spring Boot 4 targets

This has led to a slimming-down of the codebase and an upgrade of the build tools as the new Java 17 baseline allowed for the removal of old Java 8 workarounds. Performance is also slightly faster on the internal benchmark, most likely attributed to Java 17.

This also means targeting Groovy 5, which recently had a regression that caused projects compiled against Groovy 4 (like 3.x of the layout dialect) to error (thymeleaf-layout-dialect/issues/251). This upgrade should mitigate that kind of regression in future.

Deprecated layout:collect processor has been deleted

This was deprecated back in 3.0 as it was too special-purpose and generally harder to maintain, particularly with deeper layout hierarchies. It is now deleted.

The configuration constructors have been deprecated

As the number of options grows, the old way of configuring the layout dialect via one of several constructors became more confusing. When the most recent option was added, a fluent configuration API was also added, and with 4.0 these fluent configuration methods are now the preferred way to configure the layout dialect. eg:

// Old way
var layoutDialect = new LayoutDialect(new GroupingStrategy(), false);

// New way
var layoutDialect = new LayoutDialect()
  .withSortingStrategy(new GroupingStrategy())
  .withAutoHeadMerging(false);

Documentation of the configuration constructors has been replaced with the fluent API, and the constructors themselves will be removed in the next major version of the layout dialect.