In addition surrounding XHTML with a template, you can also embed a template at the current point in the page rendering with the <lift:embed/> tag.

I am an example of a template that is embedded!!

The above paragraph was embedded using this code:

    <lift:embed what="/templating/_sample_embed"/>
  

Templates that start with the underscore ('_') or period ('.') characters will not be served directly by Lift, but may be accessed using the surround and embed tags.

Lift will select templates based on the current localization setting for the session. Lift uses the function in LiftRules.localeCalculator to determine the current locale for template selection. By default the function is:

  def defaultLocaleCalculator(request: Box[HttpServletRequest]) = 
    request.flatMap(_.getLocale() match 
                    {case null => Empty 
                     case l: Locale => Full(l)}).openOr(Locale.getDefault())

But you can customize the function to return the locale of the currently logged in user, detect the IP address of the request, etc.

Based on the locale, Lift will look for templates based on the base template name, in this case '/templating/_sample_embed' and then append an underscore ('_') followed by the complete locale, for example 'en_US'. So, Lift will look for '/templating/_sample_embed_en_US.html'. If that resource is not available, Lift will look for '/templating/_sample_embed_en.html' and finally '/templating/_sample_embed.html'.