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There are some advanced features that may be useful when building WebWork applications with FreeMarker.

Type Conversion and Locales

FreeMarker has built in support for formatting dates and numbers. The formatting rules are based on the locale associated with the action request, which is by default set in webwork.properties but can be over-ridden using the Locale Interceptor. This is normally perfect for your needs, but it is important to remember that these formatting rules are handled by FreeMarker and not by WebWork's Type Convesion support.

If you want WebWork to handle the formatting according to the Type Conversion you have specified, you shouldn't use the normal ${...} syntax. Instead, you should use the property tag. The difference is that the property tag is specifically designed to take an OGNL expression, evaluate it, and then convert it to a String using any Type Conversion rules you have specified. The normal ${...} syntax will use a FreeMarker expression language, evaluate it, and then convert it to a String using the built in formatting rules. This difference is subtle but important to understand.

Extending

Sometimes you may with to extend the FreeMarker support provided with WebWork. The most common reason for doing this is that you wish to include your own Tags, such as those that you have extended from the built in WebWork Tags.

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