Page History

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Tapestry performs some simple optimizations of the logical page name (or component type, or mixin type). It checks to see if the package name is either a prefix or a suffix of the unqualified class name (case insensitively, of course) and removes the prefix or suffix if so. The net result is that a class name such as com.example.myapp.pages.user.EditUser will have a page name of user/Edit (not user/EditUser). The goal here is to provide shorter, more natural URLs.

Index Pages

One special simplification are Index pages: if the logical page name is Index after removing the package name from the unqualified class name, it will map to the root of that folder. A class such as com.example.myapp.pages.user.IndexUser or com.example.myapp.pages.user.UserIndex will have a page name of user/.

In previous versions of Tapestry there was also the concept of a start page configured with the tapestry.start-page-name configuration symbol (defaults to "start"). If a page with a name as configured with that symbol exists at the root level, this page is used as the root URL. This has precedence over an existing Index page. If for example you have a page class com.example.myapp.pages.Start it will map to /.

Pages vs. Components

The distinction between pages and component is very, very small. The only real difference is the package name: root.pages.PageName for pages, and root.components.ComponentType for components. Conceptually, page components are simply the root component of a page's component tree.

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