Loading a JSP for a Page Template From an Addon

Written by Danny Krämer

Date: 10/11/2024

If you use an Accelerator Storefront in your SAP Commerce project, you might want to introduce a new page template for a CMS site. A page template needs an associated JSP that is used to render the page. You add the path to the JSP in the field frontendTemplateName. So, we could write an Impex like this:

INSERT_UPDATE PageTemplate; $contentCV[unique = true]; uid[unique = true]; name; frontendTemplateName; restrictedPageTypes(code); active[default = true];  
                          ;                          ; <YourPageTemplate>; <YourPageTemplateName>; /pages/layout/<your-template>; ContentPage;

If we do it like this, the template is loaded from your storefront extension in the following directory: <yourstorefrontextension>/web/webroot/WEB-INF/views/responsive/pages/layout.

Now, I created a storefront addon extension to modify an existing storefront. JSPs from an addon get copied into the storefront in the views/addons/<youraddon>/responsive/. So, how do we tell the system to look into that directory? It does not work to just write something like ../addons/<youraddon>/responsive/pages/layout.

It took me some time and extensive Google searches to find the solution: The string in the frontendTemplateName gets special parsing treatment. The storefront has a UiExperienceViewResolver, and there the path to the template gets parsed. As it turns out, if you put addon: before your path, SAP Commerce searches in the addon directory instead of the base storefront template directory. So, if we change the string for the frontendTemplateName in the Impex to addon:/<youraddon>/pages/layout/<your-template>, it works just fine.