Why do we need Template(() => Templates()) ?

I have seen a few emails on the Lift mailing list where people use

Template(() => Templates("filenamehere" :: Nill))

but I never knew why they used that, instead of just naming their templates on the sitemap entry like:

Menu.i("myPage") /  "filenamehere"

And today I run into at least one use case, which makes a lot of sense and I’m very happy is there.

The problem.

I have a few template files organized under webapp/mymodule1/ , but I don’t want my users to see mymodule1 as part of the URL.

The solution.

Now I have:

Menu.i("myprofile") / "myprofile" >> Template(() => Templates("mymodule1" :: "myprofile" :: Nil).openOr(NodeSeq.Empty))

This allows me to give my users a url like http://host/myprofile , but internally I have the template for this snippet in webapp/mymodule1/myprofile.

That’s all for today, simple, small, but I think it is very useful and makes the user experience much nicer, without sacrificing development organization.

Next?

I’ll share a tip Tim Nelson gave me last week, also related to Sitemap.

Update.

You can avoid using .openOr by using:

Menu.i("myprofile") / "myprofile" >> TemplateBox(() => Templates("mymodule1" :: "myprofile" :: Nil))

Thanks to David for the update on TemplateBox.