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Service Configurations

This is an area of Tapestry IoC that is often least well understood. Tapestry services often must have some configuration to fine tune exactly what they do. One of the interactions between modules is that these service configurations are shared: they may be contributed into by any module.

Let's start with the most basic kind, the unordered configuration.

Unordered Service Configurations

One of Tapestry's features is the ability to package assets (images, style sheets, javascript libraries, etc.) inside JAR files and expose those to the client. For example, an application URL /assets/org/example/mylib/mylib.js would refer to a file, myllib.js, stored on the classpath in the /org/example/mylib folder.

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This is controlled by the ResourceDigestGenerator service, which uses its configuration to determine which file extensions require an MD5 digest.

Contributing to a Service

Main Article: Tapestry IoC Configuration

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The contribution in MyAppModule doesn't replace the normal contribution, it is combined. The end result is that .class, .tml and .pgp files would all be protected.

Receiving the Configuration

A service receives the configuration as an injected parameter ... not of type Configuration (that's used for making contributions), but instead is of type Collection:

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These kinds of unordered configurations are surprisingly rare in Tapestry (the only other notable one is for the TypeCoercer service). However, as you can see, setting up such a configuration is quite easy.

Ordered Configurations

Ordered configurations are very similar to unordered configurations ... the difference is that the configuration is provided to the service as a parameter of type List. This is used when the order of operations counts. Often these configurations are related to a design pattern such as Chain of Command or Pipeline.

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Here, we need a specific order, used to make sure that the Dispatchers don't get confused about which URLs are appropriate ... for example, an asset URL might be /assets/tapestry5/tapestry.js. This looks just like a component action URL (for page "assets/tapestry5/tapestry" and component "js"). Given that software is totally lacking in basic common-sense, we instead use careful ordering of the Dispatchers to ensure that AssetDispatcher is checked before the ComponentAction dispatcher.

Receiving the Configuration

The configuration, once assembled and ordered, is provided as a List.

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ChainBuilder is a service that builds other services. Here it creates an object of type Dispatcher in terms of the list of Dispatchers. This is one of the most common uses of service builder methods ... for when the service implementation doesn't exist, but can be constructed at runtime.

Mapped Configurations

The last type of service configuration is the mapped service configuration. Here we relate a key, often a string, to some value. The contributions are ultimately combined to form a Map.

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