Use of Velocity Generic Tools in a page decorator

Adolfo Casari

I am trying to use SortTool from Velocity Generic Tools inside a decorator that handles the search results.

The code is:

<div id="search-results-body">

            <ul class="search-results">

                #foreach($searchResult in $sorter.sort($results,
"lastModificationDate:desc"))


                 <li >
                    $action.newSearchResult($searchResult, $showExcerpts, $queryString)

                </li>

                #end

            </ul>

        </div>

Where $results is the collection of search results and $sorter is a handle to the Sorter class as explained in SortTool.

But the foreach loop is not executed since nothing is displayed, this is because $sort is null which means that confluence default velocity context don't know about that class.

How can I use those generic tools inside the decorators?

Thank you.

Adolfo Casari

I found a solution in case someone need it:

1) install velocity-tools-generic-2.0.jar in confluence/WEB-INF/lib

2) Create a plugin in order to add $sorter to Confluence velocity context:

<atlassian-plugin name="Sorter" key="confluence.extra.sorter">

<plugin-info>
    <description>
      Plugin to do sorts in velocity templates and decorators.
    </description>
    <!-- This version is displayed in the application's Plugin Manager. -->
    <version>1.0</version>
  </plugin-info>

    <velocity-context-item key="mySorter"
          name="Sorter" context-key="sorter"
          class="org.apache.velocity.tools.generic.SortTool" />
</atlassian-plugin>

Now the search results are ordered descending. I would like to know if there is a cleaner way to do 2), since just doing 1) didn't do, nothing was shown.