Fetch thymeleaf fragments from external URL

Question

I have a spring-boot/thymeleaf website on server A, and I want to load some fragments from server B. The fragments are dynamic and some of them call java methods defined in server A, so what I need is to fetch those fragments (as plain text?) from server B and include them in my html pages in server A, where they will be processed etc. Server B will act like a repository, it won't do any processing at all, just serve the fragments to server A.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Ok, I posted this question because all my attempts were failing, but after all it was just a typo that was holding me back... So here's what worked for me, in case anyone is interested:

1. I saved the fragments in src/main/resources/static/fragments on server B. Let's assume a file named frg with a fragment called "content" inside it.

2. I created a controller in server B to serve the files as plain text, like this:

    import org.springframework.core.io.ClassPathResource;
    import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
    import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.PathVariable;
    import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
    import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ResponseBody;

    import java.io.File;
    import java.nio.file.Files;

    import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;

    @Controller
    public class FragmentsController {

        @RequestMapping(value = "/fragments/{fragmentPage}")
        @ResponseBody
        public String GetFragment (@PathVariable String fragmentPage, HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception {
            response.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/plain");
            response.setHeader("success", "no");
            if (fragmentPage == null)
            {
                System.err.println("Nothing to serve!");
                return null;
            }

            System.out.println("Serving fragment: " + fragmentPage);
            String fileName = "static/fragments/"+fragmentPage;

            File resource = new ClassPathResource(fileName).getFile();
            String frg = "";
            try
            {
                frg= new String(Files.readAllBytes(resource.toPath()));
                response.setHeader("success", "yes");
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                frg = "Error loading fragment: " + e.getMessage();
            }
            return frg;
        }
    }

3. From server A, I can now fetch the fragment like this:

<div th:include="http://<server_b_url:port>/fragments/frg :: content"></div>