Chapter 6. Common tasks with Lift WebKit

There are many ways to achieve similar results in Lift, especially with templating and rendering. This chapter will show different ways that templates can be composed together and how you can control the rendering of dynamic content in your applications. Lift’s view system, for example, is perfect for generating markup content from anything other than a standard template while still maintaining full access to the application state.

We also look at how you can effectively utilize Lift’s type-safe session and request variables to hold on to important pieces of application state. From there we move on to look at Lift’s stateful page flow mechanisms, LiftScreen and Wizard. Finally, we touch on what are known as Lift’s widgets, which are a group of ready-made components that provide an easy API for adding things like autocomplete text boxes to your apps.

The first things we cover are Lift’s templates, views, and snippets, because these are typically where most users will spend the majority of their time working with Lift.

6.1. Templates, snippets, and views

6.2. Managing state

6.3. Forms with LiftScreen and Wizard

6.4. Widgets

6.5. Summary