| Another circumstance in which we may prefer to avoid the creation of custom panels is when we want to conditionally display in a page small fragments of markup. In this case if we decided to use panels, we would end up having a huge number of small panel classes with their related markup file. |
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| To better cope with situations like this, Wicket defines component @Fragment@ in package @org.apache.wicket.markup.html.panel@. Just like its parent component @WebMarkupContainer@, Fragment doesn't have its own markup file but it uses a markup fragment defined in the markup file of its parent container, which can be a page or a panel. The fragment must be delimited with tag @<wicket:fragment>@ and must be identified by a @wicket:id@ attribute. In addition to the component id, @Fragment@'s constructor takes as input also the id of the fragment and a reference to its container. |
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| In the following example we have defined a fragment in a page and we used it as content area: |
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| *Page markup:* |
| |
| {code:html} |
| <html> |
| ... |
| <body> |
| ... |
| <div wicket:id="contentArea"></div> |
| <wicket:fragment wicket:id="fragmentId"> |
| <!-- Fragment markup goes here --> |
| </wicket:fragment> |
| </body> |
| </html> |
| {code} |
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| *Java code:* |
| |
| {code} |
| Fragment fragment = new Fragment ("contentArea", "fragmentId", this); |
| add(fragment); |
| {code} |
| |
| Fragments can be very helpful with complex pages or components. For example let's say that we have a page where users can register to our forum. This page should first display a form where user must insert his/her personal data (name, username, password, email and so on), then, once the user has submitted the form, the page should display a message like “Your registration is complete! Please check your mail to activate your user profile.”. |
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| Instead of displaying this message with a new component or in a new page, we can define two fragments: one for the initial form and one to display the confirmation message. The second fragment will replace the first one after the form has been submitted: |
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| *Page markup:* |
| |
| {code:html} |
| <html> |
| <body> |
| <div wicket:id="contentArea"></div> |
| <wicket:fragment wicket:id="formFrag"> |
| <!-- Form markup goes here --> |
| </wicket:fragment> |
| <wicket:fragment wicket:id="messageFrag"> |
| <!-- Message markup goes here --> |
| </wicket:fragment> |
| </body> |
| </html> |
| {code} |
| |
| *Java code:* |
| |
| {code} |
| Fragment fragment = new Fragment ("contentArea", "formFrag", this); |
| add(fragment); |
| |
| //form has been submitted |
| Fragment fragment = new Fragment ("contentArea", "messageFrag", this); |
| replace(fragment); |
| {code} |
