1 Introduction

Dynamic frameworks like Rails, Django and TurboGears helped pave the way to a more modern way of thinking about web applications. Grails builds on these concepts and dramatically reduces the complexity of building web applications on the Java platform. What makes it different, however, is that it does so by building on already established Java technologies like Spring and Hibernate.

Grails is a full stack framework and attempts to solve as many pieces of the web development puzzle through the core technology and its associated plugins. Included out the box are things like:

• An easy to use Object Relational Mapping (ORM) layer built on Hibernate
• An expressive view technology called Groovy Server Pages (GSP)
• A controller layer built on Spring MVC
• An interactive command line environment and build system based on Gradle
• An embedded Tomcat container which is configured for on the fly reloading
• Dependency injection with the inbuilt Spring container
• Support for internationalization (i18n) built on Spring's core MessageSource concept
• A transactional service layer built on Spring's transaction abstraction

All of these are made easy to use through the power of the Groovy language and the extensive use of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs)

This documentation will take you through getting started with Grails and building web applications with the Grails framework.

1.1 What's new in Grails 3.0?

1.1.1 Core Features

Groovy 2.4

Grails 3.0 comes with Groovy 2.4 which includes many new features and enhancements.

For more information on Groovy 2.4, see the release notes for more information.

Spring 4.1 and Spring Boot 1.2

Grails 3.0 comes with Spring 4.1 which includes many new features and enhancements.

In addition, Grails 3.0 is built on Spring Boot 1.2 which provides the ability to produce runnable JAR files that can embed Tomcat, Jetty or Undertow containers.

Gradle Build System

Grails 3.0 deprecates the older Gant-based build system in favour of a new Gradle-based build that integrates closely with the Gradle plugin ecosystem.

See the new section on the new Gradle build for more information.

Application Profiles

Grails 3.0 supports the notion of application profiles via a new profile repository. A profile encapsulates an application structure, set of commands, plugins and capabilities. For example the "web" profile allows construction of web applications deployable to a Servlet container. In the future more profiles will be developed targeting different environments.

See the new section on Profiles for more information.

Redesigned API based on Traits

The Grails API has been redesigned so that public API is correctly populated under the grails. package whilst private / internal API that is subject to change can be found in the org.grails. package. The core API has also been rewritten and based around the Groovy Traits.

See the new documentation on Grails 3.0's core traits for more information.

1.1.2 Web Features

New Interceptors API

In previous versions of Grails, filters were used to define logic that intercepts controller action execution.

As of Grails 3.0, this API is deprecated and has been replaced by the new Interceptor API. An example interceptor can be seen below:

class MyInterceptor {
  boolean before() { true }
  boolean after() { true }
  void afterView() {
    // no-op
  }
}

1.1.3 Development Environment Features

New Shell and Code Generation API

Replacing Gant, Grails 3.0 features a new interactive command line shell that integrates closely with Gradle and provides APIs for writing scripts that interact with Gradle and perform code generation.

The new shell integrates closely with the concept of application profiles with each profile capable defining profile specific commands. As with previous versions of Grails, plugins can define new shell commands that can invoke Gradle or perform code generation and project automation tasks.

See the new guide on Creating Custom Scripts for more information.

Enhanced IDE Integration

Since Grails 3.0 is built on Gradle, you can now import a Grails project using IntelliJ community edition or GGTS's Gradle tooling support without the need for Grails specific tooling. Grails 3.0 plugins are published as simple JAR files greatly reducing the need for additional IDE support specific to Grails.

Application Main Class

Each new Grails 3.0 project features an Application class that has a traditional static void main signature, meaning to run or debug a Grails 3.0 application from an IDE like IntelliJ or GGTS you can simply right-click on the Application class and execute to start your Grails application. All Grails 3.0 tests can also just be run from the IDE directly without needing to resort to the command line (even integration / functional tests!).

1.1.4 Testing Features

Integration and Geb Functional Tests

Grails 3.0 supports built in support for Spock/Geb functional tests using the create-functional-test command. Functional tests are based on Spring Boot's test running mechanism and load the application just once for an entire suite of tests. The tests can be run from and IDE and don't require the command line.

Gradle Test Running

Since Grails 3.0 is built on Gradle the test execution configuration is much more flexible and can easily configured to execute in parallel.

2 Getting Started

2.1 Installation Requirements

To automate the installation of Grails we recommend the GVM tool which greatly simplifies installing and managing multiple Grails versions.

For manual installation, we recommend the video installation guides from grailsexample.net:

• Windows
• Linux
• Mac OS X

These will show you how to install Grails too, not just the JDK.

A JDK is required in your Grails development environment. A JRE is not sufficient.

On some platforms (for example OS X) the Java installation is automatically detected. However in many cases you will want to manually configure the location of Java. For example:

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
export PATH="$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin"

if you're using bash or another variant of the Bourne Shell.

2.2 Downloading and Installing

The best way to install Grails on *nix systems is with the GVM tool which greatly simplifies installing and managing multiple Grails versions.

For manual installation follow these steps:

• Download a binary distribution of Grails and extract the resulting zip file to a location of your choice
• Set the GRAILS_HOME environment variable to the location where you extracted the zip
• On Unix/Linux based systems this is typically a matter of adding something like the following export GRAILS_HOME=/path/to/grails to your profile
• On Windows this is typically a matter of setting an environment variable under My Computer/Advanced/Environment Variables
• Then add the bin directory to your PATH variable:
• On Unix/Linux based systems this can be done by adding export PATH="$PATH:$GRAILS_HOME/bin" to your profile
• On Windows this is done by modifying the Path environment variable under My Computer/Advanced/Environment Variables

If Grails is working correctly you should now be able to type grails -version in the terminal window and see output similar to this:

bc. Grails version: 3.0.0

2.3 Creating an Application

grails [command name]

Run create-app to create an application:

grails create-app helloworld

This will create a new directory inside the current one that contains the project. Navigate to this directory in your console:

cd helloworld

2.4 A Hello World Example

$ cd helloworld
$ grails

You should see a prompt that looks like this:

What we want is a simple page that just prints the message "Hello World!" to the browser. In Grails, whenever you want a new page you just create a new controller action for it. Since we don't yet have a controller, let's create one now with the create-controller command:

grails> create-controller hello

Don't forget that in the interactive console, we have auto-completion on command names. So you can type "cre" and then press <tab> to get a list of all create-* commands. Type a few more letters of the command name and then <tab> again to finish.

The above command will create a new controller in the grails-app/controllers/helloworld directory called HelloController.groovy. Why the extra helloworld directory? Because in Java land, it's strongly recommended that all classes are placed into packages, so Grails defaults to the application name if you don't provide one. The reference page for create-controller provides more detail on this.

We now have a controller so let's add an action to generate the "Hello World!" page. The code looks like this:

package helloworld
class HelloController {
    def index() {
        render "Hello World!"
    }
}

The action is simply a method. In this particular case, it calls a special method provided by Grails to render the page.

Job done. To see your application in action, you just need to start up a server with another command called run-app:

grails> run-app

This will start an embedded server on port 8080 that hosts your application. You should now be able to access your application at the URL http://localhost:8080/ - try it!

Note that in previous versions of Grails the context path was by default the name of the application. If you wish to restore this behavior you can configure a context path in grails-app/conf/application.yml:

server:
    'context-path': '/helloworld'

With the above configuration in place the server will instead startup at the URL http://localhost:8080/helloworld/.

If you see the error "Server failed to start for port 8080: Address already in use", then it means another server is running on that port. You can easily work around this by running your server on a different port using run-app -port=9090. '9090' is just an example: you can pretty much choose anything within the range 1024 to 49151.

The result will look something like this:

This is the Grails intro page which is rendered by the grails-app/view/index.gsp file. It detects the presence of your controllers and provides links to them. You can click on the "HelloController" link to see our custom page containing the text "Hello World!". Voila! You have your first working Grails application.

One final thing: a controller can contain many actions, each of which corresponds to a different page (ignoring AJAX at this point). Each page is accessible via a unique URL that is composed from the controller name and the action name: /<appname>/<controller>/<action>. This means you can access the Hello World page via /helloworld/hello/index, where 'hello' is the controller name (remove the 'Controller' suffix from the class name and lower-case the first letter) and 'index' is the action name. But you can also access the page via the same URL without the action name: this is because 'index' is the default action . See the end of the controllers and actions section of the user guide to find out more on default actions.

2.5 Using Interactive Mode

For more information on the capabilities of interactive mode refer to the section on Interactive Mode in the user guide.

2.6 Getting Set Up in an IDE

IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA is an excellent IDE for Grails 3.0 development. It comes in 2 editions, the free community edition and the paid-for ultimate edition.

The community edition can be used for most things, although GSP syntax higlighting is only part of the ultimate edition. To get started with Intellij IDEA and Grails 3.0 simply go to File / Import Project and point IDEA at your build.gradle file to import and configure the project.

Eclipse

We recommend that users of Eclipse looking to develop Grails application take a look at Groovy/Grails Tool Suite, which offers built in support for Grails including automatic classpath management, a GSP editor and quick access to Grails commands.

Like Intellij you can import a Grails 3.0 project using the Gradle project integration.

NetBeans

NetBeans provides a Groovy/Grails plugin that automatically recognizes Grails projects and provides the ability to run Grails applications in the IDE, code completion and integration with the Glassfish server. For an overview of features see the NetBeans Integration guide on the Grails website which was written by the NetBeans team.

TextMate, Sublime, VIM etc.

There are several excellent text editors that work nicely with Groovy and Grails. See below for references:

• A TextMate bundle exists Groovy / Grails support in Textmate
• A Sublime Text plugin can be installed via Sublime Package Control for the Sublime Text Editor.
• See this post for some helpful tips on how to setup VIM as your Grails editor of choise.
• An Atom Package is available for use with the Atom editor

2.7 Convention over Configuration

Here is a breakdown and links to the relevant sections:

• grails-app - top level directory for Groovy sources
• conf - Configuration sources.
• controllers - Web controllers - The C in MVC.
• domain - The application domain.
• i18n - Support for internationalization (i18n).
• services - The service layer.
• taglib - Tag libraries.
• utils - Grails specific utilities.
• views - Groovy Server Pages - The V in MVC.
• scripts - Code generation scripts.
• src/main/groovy - Supporting sources
• src/test/groovy - Unit and integration tests.

2.8 Running an Application

grails run-app

You can specify a different port by using the server.port argument:

grails -Dserver.port=8090 run-app

Note that it is better to start up the application in interactive mode since a container restart is much quicker:

$ grails
grails> run-app
| Server running. Browse to http://localhost:8080/helloworld
| Application loaded in interactive mode. Type 'stop-app' to shutdown.
| Downloading: plugins-list.xml
grails> stop-app
| Stopping Grails server
grails> run-app
| Server running. Browse to http://localhost:8080/helloworld
| Application loaded in interactive mode. Type 'stop-app' to shutdown.
| Downloading: plugins-list.xml

More information on the run-app command can be found in the reference guide.

2.9 Testing an Application

To execute tests you run the test-app command as follows:

grails test-app

2.10 Deploying an Application

If you are deploying to a traditional container (Tomcat, Jetty etc.) you can create a Web Application Archive (WAR file), and Grails includes the war command for performing this task:

grails war

This will produce a WAR file under the build/libs directory which can then be deployed as per your container's instructions.

Note that by default Grails will include an embeddable version of Tomcat inside the WAR file, this can cause problems if you deploy to a different version of Tomcat. If you don't intend to use the embedded container then you should change the scope of the Tomcat dependencies to provided prior to deploying to your production container in build.gradle:

provided "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-tomcat"

Unlike most scripts which default to the development environment unless overridden, the war command runs in the production environment by default. You can override this like any script by specifying the environment name, for example:

grails dev war

If you prefer not to operate a separate Servlet container then you can simply run the Grails WAR file as a regular Java application. Example:

grails war
java -Dgrails.env=prod -jar build/libs/mywar-0.1.war

When deploying Grails you should always run your containers JVM with the -server option and with sufficient memory allocation. A good set of VM flags would be:

-server -Xmx768M -XX:MaxPermSize=256m

2.11 Supported Java EE Containers

• Tomcat 7
• GlassFish 3 or above
• Resin 4 or above
• JBoss 6 or above
• Jetty 8 or above
• Oracle Weblogic 12c or above
• IBM WebSphere 8.0 or above

It's required to set "-Xverify:none" in "Application servers > server > Process Definition > Java Virtual Machine > Generic JVM arguments" for older versions of WebSphere. This is no longer needed for WebSphere version 8 or newer.

Some containers have bugs however, which in most cases can be worked around. A list of known deployment issues can be found on the Grails wiki.

2.12 Creating Artefacts

These are just for your convenience and you can just as easily use an IDE or your favourite text editor.

grails create-app helloworld
cd helloworld
grails create-domain-class book

This will result in the creation of a domain class at grails-app/domain/helloworld/Book.groovy such as:

package helloworld
class Book {
}

There are many such create-* commands that can be explored in the command line reference guide.

To decrease the amount of time it takes to run Grails scripts, use the interactive mode.

2.13 Generating an Application

grails generate-all helloworld.Book

3 Upgrading from Grails 2.x

When upgrading an application or plugin from Grails 3.0 there are many areas to consider including:

• Project structure differences
• File location differences
• Configuration differences
• Package name differences
• Legacy Gant Scripts
• Gradle Build System
• Changes to Plugins
• Source vs Binary Plugins

The best approach to take when upgrading a plugin or application (and if your application is using several plugins the plugins will need upgrading first) is to create a new Grails 3.0 application of the same name and copy the source files into the correct locations in the new application.

Project Structure Changes

File Location Differences

The location of certain files have changed or been replaced with other files in Grails 3.0. The following table lists old default locations and their respective new locations:

For plugins the plugin descriptor (a Groovy file ending with "GrailsPlugin") which was previously located in the root of the plugin directory should be moved to the src/main/groovy directory under an appropriate package.

New Files Not Present in Grails 2.x

The reason it is best to create a new application and copy your original sources to it is because there are a number of new files that are not present in Grails 2.x by default. These include:

Files Not Present in Grails 3.x

Some files that were previously created by Grails 2.x are no longer created. These have either been removed or an appropriate replacement added. The following table lists files no longer in use:

3.1 Upgrading Plugins

Step 1 - Create a new Grails 3 plugin

The first step is to create a new Grails 3 plugin using the command line:

$ grails create-plugin quartz

This will create a Grails 3 plugin in the quartz directory.

Step 2 - Copy sources from the original Grails 2 plugin

The next step is to copy the sources from the original Grails 2 plugin to the Grails 3 plugin:

# first the sources
cp -rf ../quartz-2.x/src/groovy src/main/groovy
cp -rf ../quartz-2.x/src/java src/main/groovy
cp -rf ../quartz-2.x/grails-app grails-app
cp -rf ../quartz-2.x/QuartzGrailsPlugin.groovy src/main/groovy/grails/plugins/quartz
# then the tests
cp -rf ../quartz-2.x/test/unit src/test/groovy
mkdir -p src/integration-test/groovy
cp -rf ../quartz-2.x/test/integration src/integration-test/groovy
# then templates / other resources
cp -rf ../quartz-2.x/src/templates src/main/templates

Step 3 - Alter the plugin descriptor

You will need to add a package declaration to the plugin descriptor. In this case QuartzGrailsPlugin is modified as follows:

// add package declaration
package grails.plugins.quartz
…
class QuartzGrailsPlugin {
 …
}

In addition you should remove the version property from the descriptor as this is now defined in build.gradle.

Step 4 - Update the Gradle build with required dependencies

The repositories and dependencies defined in grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy of the original Grails 2.x plugin will need to be defined in build.gradle of the new Grails 3.x plugin:

compile("org.quartz-scheduler:quartz:2.2.1") {
    exclude group: 'slf4j-api', module: 'c3p0'
  }

Step 5 - Modify Package Imports

In Grails 3.x all internal APIs can be found in the org.grails package and public facing APIs in the grails package. The org.codehaus.groovy.grails package no longer exists.

All package declaration in sources should be modified for the new location of the respective classes. Example org.codehaus.groovy.grails.commons.GrailsApplication is now grails.core.GrailsApplication.

Step 5 - Migrate Plugin Specific Config to application.yml

Some plugins define a default configuration file. For example the Quartz plugin defines a file called grails-app/conf/DefaultQuartzConfig.groovy. In Grails 3.x this default configuration can be migrated to grails-app/conf/application.yml and it will automatically be loaded by Grails without requiring manual configuration merging.

Step 6 - Register ArtefactHandler Definitions

In Grails 3.x ArtefactHandler definitions written in Java need to be declared in a file called src/main/resources/META-INF/grails.factories since these need to be known at compile time.

If the ArtefactHandler is written in Groovy this step can be skipped as Grails will automatically create the grails.factories file during compilation.

The Quartz plugin requires the following definition to register the ArtrefactHandler:

grails.core.ArtefactHandler=grails.plugins.quartz.JobArtefactHandler

Step 7 - Migrate Code Generation Scripts

Many plugins previously defined command line scripts in Gant. In Grails 3.x command line scripts have been replaced by two new features: Code generation scripts and Gradle tasks.

If your script is doing simple code generation then for many cases a code generation script can replace an old Gant script.

The create-job script provided by the Quartz plugin in Grails 2.x was defined in scripts/CreateJob.groovy as:

includeTargets << grailsScript("_GrailsCreateArtifacts")
target(createJob: "Creates a new Quartz scheduled job") {
    depends(checkVersion, parseArguments)
    def type = "Job"
    promptForName(type: type)
    for (name in argsMap.params) {
        name = purgeRedundantArtifactSuffix(name, type)
        createArtifact(name: name, suffix: type, type: type, path: "grails-app/jobs")
        createUnitTest(name: name, suffix: type)
    }
}
setDefaultTarget 'createJob'

A replacement Grails 3.x compatible script can be created using the create-script command:

$ grails create-script create-job

Which creates a new script called src/main/scripts/create-job.groovy. Using the new code generation API it is simple to implement:

description("Creates a new Quartz scheduled job") {
    usage "grails create-job [JOB NAME]"
    argument name:'Job Name', description:"The name of the job"
}
model = model( args[0] )
render  template:"Job.groovy",
        destination: file( "grails-app/jobs/$model.packagePath/${model.simpleName}Job.groovy"),
        model: model

Please refer to the documentation on Creating Custom Scripts for more information.

Migrating More Complex Scripts Using Gradle Tasks

Using the old Grails 2.x build system it was relatively common to spin up Grails inside the command line. In Grails 3.x it is not possible to load a Grails application within a code generation script created by the create-script command.

Instead a new mechanism specific to plugins exists via the create-command command. The create-command command will create a new ApplicationCommand, for example the following command will execute a query:

import grails.dev.commands.*
import javax.sql.*
import groovy.sql.*
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.*
class RunQueryCommand implements ApplicationCommand {
  @Autowired
  DataSource dataSource
  boolean handle(ExecutionContext ctx) {
      def sql = new Sql(dataSource)
      println sql.executeQuery("select * from foo")
      return true
  }
}

With this command in place once the plugin is installed into your local Maven cache you can add the plugin to both the build classpath and the runtime classpath of the application's build.gradle file:

buildscript {
  …
  dependencies {
    classpath "org.grails.plugins:myplugin:0.1-SNAPSHOT"
  }
}
…
dependencies {
  runtime "org.grails.plugins:myplugin:0.1-SNAPSHOT"
}

Grails will automatically create a Gradle task called runQuery and a command named run-query so both the following examples will execute the command:

$ grails run-query
$ gradle runQuery

Step 8 - Delete Files that were migrated or no longer used

You should now delete and cleanup the project of any files no longer required by Grails 3.x (BuildConfig.groovy, Config.groovy, DataSource.groovy etc.)

3.2 Upgrading Applications

Step 1 - Create a New Application

Once the plugins are Grails 3.x compatible you can upgrade the application. To upgrade an application it is again best to create a new Grails 3 application using the "web" profile:

$ grails create-app myapp
$ cd myapp

Step 2 - Migrate Sources

The next step is to copy the sources from the original Grails 2 application to the Grails 3 application:

# first the sources
cp -rf ../old_app/src/groovy src/main/groovy
cp -rf ../old_app/src/java src/main/groovy
cp -rf ../old_app/grails-app grails-app
# then the tests
cp -rf ../old_app/test/unit src/test/groovy
mkdir -p src/integration-test/groovy
cp -rf ../old_app/test/integration src/integration-test/groovy

Step 3 - Update the Gradle build with required dependencies

The repositories and dependencies defined in grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy of the original Grails 2.x application will need to be defined in build.gradle of the new Grails 3.x application.

Step 4 - Modify Package Imports

In Grails 3.x all internal APIs can be found in the org.grails package and public facing APIs in the grails package. The org.codehaus.groovy.grails package no longer exists.

All package declaration in sources should be modified for the new location of the respective classes. Example org.codehaus.groovy.grails.commons.GrailsApplication is now grails.core.GrailsApplication.

Step 5 - Migrate Configuration

The configuration of the application will need to be migrated, this can normally be done by simply renaming grails-app/conf/Config.groovy to grails-app/conf/application.groovy and merging the content of grails-app/conf/DataSource.groovy into grails-app/conf/application.groovy.

Note however that Log4j has been replaced by grails-app/conf/logback.groovy for logging, so any logging configuration in grails-app/conf/Config.groovy should be migrated to logback format.

Step 6 - Migrate web.xml Modifications to Spring

If you have a modified web.xml template then you will need to migrate this to Spring as Grails 3.x does not use a web.xml (although it is still possible to have on in src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml).

New servlets and filters can be registered as Spring beans or with ServletRegistrationBean and FilterRegistrationBean respectively.

Migrate Static Assets not handled by Asset Pipeline

If you have static assets in your web-app directory of your Grails 2.x application such as HTML files, TLDs etc. these need to be moved. For public assets such as static HTML pages and so on these should go in src/main/resources/public.

TLD descriptors and not public assets should go in src/main/resources/WEB-INF .

Step 8 - Migrate Tests

Once the package names are corrected unit tests will continue to run, however any tests that extend the deprecated and removed JUnit 3 hierarchy will need to be migrated to Spock or JUnit 4.

Integration tests will need to be annotated with the Integration annotation and should not extend GroovyTestCase or any JUnit 3 super class.

4 Configuration

4.1 Basic Configuration

Build configuration is generally done via Gradle and the build.gradle file. Runtime configuration is by default specified in YAML in the grails-app/conf/application.yml file.

If you prefer to use Grails 2.0-style Groovy configuration then you can create an additional grails-app/conf/application.groovy file to specify configuration using Groovy's ConfigSlurper syntax.

For Groovy configuration the following variables are available to the configuration script:

For example:

my.tmp.dir = "${userHome}/.grails/tmp"

If you want to read runtime configuration settings, i.e. those defined in application.yml, use the grailsApplication object, which is available as a variable in controllers and tag libraries:

class MyController {
    def hello() {
        def recipient = grailsApplication.config.getProperty('foo.bar.hello')
        render "Hello ${recipient}"
    }
}

The config property of the grailsApplication object is an instance of the Config interface and provides a number of useful methods to read the configuration of the application.

Notice that the Config instance is a merged configuration based on Spring's PropertySource concept and reads configuration from the environment, system properties and the local application configuration merging them into a single object.

and can be easily injected into services and other Grails artifacts:

import grails.core.*
class MyService {
    GrailsApplication grailsApplication
    String greeting() {
        def recipient = grailsApplication.config.getProperty('foo.bar.hello')
        return "Hello ${recipient}"
    }
}

Finally, you can also use Spring's Value annotation to dependency injection configuration values:

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.*
class MyController {
    @Value('${foo.bar.hello}')
    String recipient
    def hello() {
        render "Hello ${recipient}"
    }
}

In Groovy code you must use single quotes around the string for the value of the Value annotation otherwise it is interpreted as a GString not a Spring expression.

As you can see, when accessing configuration settings you use the same dot notation as when you define them.

4.1.1 Built in options

Runtime settings

On the runtime front, i.e. grails-app/conf/application.yml, there are quite a few more core settings:

• grails.enable.native2ascii - Set this to false if you do not require native2ascii conversion of Grails i18n properties files (default: true).
• grails.views.default.codec - Sets the default encoding regime for GSPs - can be one of 'none', 'html', or 'base64' (default: 'none'). To reduce risk of XSS attacks, set this to 'html'.
• grails.views.gsp.encoding - The file encoding used for GSP source files (default: 'utf-8').
• grails.mime.file.extensions - Whether to use the file extension to dictate the mime type in Content Negotiation (default: true).
• grails.mime.types - A map of supported mime types used for Content Negotiation.
• grails.serverURL - A string specifying the server URL portion of absolute links, including server name e.g. grails.serverURL="http://my.yourportal.com". See createLink. Also used by redirects.
• grails.views.gsp.sitemesh.preprocess - Determines whether SiteMesh preprocessing happens. Disabling this slows down page rendering, but if you need SiteMesh to parse the generated HTML from a GSP view then disabling it is the right option. Don't worry if you don't understand this advanced property: leave it set to true.
• grails.reload.excludes and grails.reload.includes - Configuring these directives determines the reload behavior for project specific source files. Each directive takes a list of strings that are the class names for project source files that should be excluded from reloading behavior or included accordingly when running the application in development with the run-app command. If the grails.reload.includes directive is configured, then only the classes in that list will be reloaded.

4.1.2 Logging

If you prefer XML you can replace the logback.groovy file with a logback.xml file instead.

For more information on configuring logging refer to the Logback documentation on the subject.

4.1.3 GORM

• grails.gorm.failOnError - If set to true, causes the save() method on domain classes to throw a grails.validation.ValidationException if validation fails during a save. This option may also be assigned a list of Strings representing package names. If the value is a list of Strings then the failOnError behavior will only be applied to domain classes in those packages (including sub-packages). See the save method docs for more information.

For example, to enable failOnError for all domain classes:

grails:
    gorm:
        failOnError: true

and to enable failOnError for domain classes by package:

grails:
    gorm:
        failOnError:
            - com.companyname.somepackage
            - com.companyname.someotherpackage

• grails.gorm.autoFlush - If set to true, causes the merge, save and delete methods to flush the session, replacing the need to explicitly flush using save(flush: true).

4.2 The Application Class

The Application class subclasses the GrailsAutoConfiguration class and features a static void main method, meaning it can be run as a regular application.

4.2.1 Executing the Application Class

This is also useful for debugging since you can debug directly from the IDE without having to connect a remote debugger when using the run-app --debug-jvm command from the command line.

You can also package your application into a runnable WAR file, for example:

$ grails package
$ java -jar build/libs/myapp-0.1.war

This is useful if you plan to deploy your application using a container-less approach.

4.2.2 Customizing the Application Class

Customizing Scanning

By default Grails will scan all known source directories for controllers, domain class etc., however if there are packages in other JAR files you wish to scan you can do so by overriding the packageNames() method of the Application class:

class Application extends GrailsAutoConfiguration {
    @Override
    Collection<String> packageNames() {
        super.packageNames() + ['my.additional.package']
    }
    …
}

Registering Additional Beans

The Application class can also be used as a source for Spring bean definitions, simply define a method annotated with the Bean and the returned object will become a Spring bean. The name of the method is used as the bean name:

class Application extends GrailsAutoConfiguration {
    @Bean
    MyType myBean() {
        return new MyType()
    }
    …
}

4.2.3 The Application LifeCycle

This means that the Application class can be used to perform the same functions as a plugin. You can override the regular plugins hooks such as doWithSpring, doWithApplicationContext and so on by overriding the appropriate method:

class Application extends GrailsAutoConfiguration {
    @Override
    Closure doWithSpring() {
        {->
            mySpringBean(MyType)
        }
    }
    …
}

4.3 Environments

Per Environment Configuration

Grails supports the concept of per environment configuration. The application.yml and application.groovy files in the grails-app/conf directory can use per-environment configuration using either YAML or the syntax provided by ConfigSlurper. As an example consider the following default application.yml definition provided by Grails:

environments:
    development:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: create-drop
            url: jdbc:h2:mem:devDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
    test:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: update
            url: jdbc:h2:mem:testDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
    production:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: update
            url: jdbc:h2:prodDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
        properties:
           jmxEnabled: true
           initialSize: 5
        ...

The above can expression in Groovy syntax in application.groovy as follows:

dataSource {
    pooled = false
    driverClassName = "org.h2.Driver"
    username = "sa"
    password = ""
}
environments {
    development {
        dataSource {
            dbCreate = "create-drop"
            url = "jdbc:h2:mem:devDb"
        }
    }
    test {
        dataSource {
            dbCreate = "update"
            url = "jdbc:h2:mem:testDb"
        }
    }
    production {
        dataSource {
            dbCreate = "update"
            url = "jdbc:h2:prodDb"
        }
    }
}

Notice how the common configuration is provided at the top level and then an environments block specifies per environment settings for the dbCreate and url properties of the DataSource.

Packaging and Running for Different Environments

Grails' command line has built in capabilities to execute any command within the context of a specific environment. The format is:

grails [environment] [command name]

In addition, there are 3 preset environments known to Grails: dev, prod, and test for development, production and test. For example to create a WAR for the test environment you wound run:

grails test war

To target other environments you can pass a grails.env variable to any command:

grails -Dgrails.env=UAT run-app

Programmatic Environment Detection

Within your code, such as in a Gant script or a bootstrap class you can detect the environment using the Environment class:

import grails.util.Environment
...
switch (Environment.current) {
    case Environment.DEVELOPMENT:
        configureForDevelopment()
        break
    case Environment.PRODUCTION:
        configureForProduction()
        break
}

Per Environment Bootstrapping

It's often desirable to run code when your application starts up on a per-environment basis. To do so you can use the grails-app/conf/BootStrap.groovy file's support for per-environment execution:

def init = { ServletContext ctx ->
    environments {
        production {
            ctx.setAttribute("env", "prod")
        }
        development {
            ctx.setAttribute("env", "dev")
        }
    }
    ctx.setAttribute("foo", "bar")
}

Generic Per Environment Execution

The previous BootStrap example uses the grails.util.Environment class internally to execute. You can also use this class yourself to execute your own environment specific logic:

Environment.executeForCurrentEnvironment {
    production {
        // do something in production
    }
    development {
        // do something only in development
    }
}

4.4 The DataSource

If you use a database other than H2 you need a JDBC driver. For example for MySQL you would need Connector/J

Drivers typically come in the form of a JAR archive. It's best to use the dependency resolution to resolve the jar if it's available in a Maven repository, for example you could add a dependency for the MySQL driver like this:

dependencies {
        runtime 'mysql:mysql-connector-java:5.1.29'
    }

If you can't use dependency resolution then just put the JAR in your project's lib directory.

Once you have the JAR resolved you need to get familiar Grails' DataSource descriptor file located at grails-app/conf/DataSource.groovy. This file contains the dataSource definition which includes the following settings:

• driverClassName - The class name of the JDBC driver
• username - The username used to establish a JDBC connection
• password - The password used to establish a JDBC connection
• url - The JDBC URL of the database
• dbCreate - Whether to auto-generate the database from the domain model - one of 'create-drop', 'create', 'update' or 'validate'
• pooled - Whether to use a pool of connections (defaults to true)
• logSql - Enable SQL logging to stdout
• formatSql - Format logged SQL
• dialect - A String or Class that represents the Hibernate dialect used to communicate with the database. See the org.hibernate.dialect package for available dialects.
• readOnly - If true makes the DataSource read-only, which results in the connection pool calling setReadOnly(true) on each Connection
• transactional - If false leaves the DataSource's transactionManager bean outside the chained BE1PC transaction manager implementation. This only applies to additional datasources.
• persistenceInterceptor - The default datasource is automatically wired up to the persistence interceptor, other datasources are not wired up automatically unless this is set to true
• properties - Extra properties to set on the DataSource bean. See the Tomcat Pool documentation. There is also a Javadoc format documentation of the properties.
• jmxExport - If false, will disable registration of JMX MBeans for all DataSources. By default JMX MBeans are added for DataSources with jmxEnabled = true in properties.

A typical configuration for MySQL may be something like:

dataSource {
    pooled = true
    dbCreate = "update"
    url = "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/my_database"
    driverClassName = "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
    dialect = org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect
    username = "username"
    password = "password"
    properties {
       jmxEnabled = true
       initialSize = 5
       maxActive = 50
       minIdle = 5
       maxIdle = 25
       maxWait = 10000
       maxAge = 10 * 60000
       timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis = 5000
       minEvictableIdleTimeMillis = 60000
       validationQuery = "SELECT 1"
       validationQueryTimeout = 3
       validationInterval = 15000
       testOnBorrow = true
       testWhileIdle = true
       testOnReturn = false
       jdbcInterceptors = "ConnectionState;StatementCache(max=200)"
       defaultTransactionIsolation = java.sql.Connection.TRANSACTION_READ_COMMITTED
    }
}

When configuring the DataSource do not include the type or the def keyword before any of the configuration settings as Groovy will treat these as local variable definitions and they will not be processed. For example the following is invalid:

dataSource {
    boolean pooled = true // type declaration results in ignored local variable
    …
}

Example of advanced configuration using extra properties:

dataSource {
    pooled = true
    dbCreate = "update"
    url = "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/my_database"
    driverClassName = "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
    dialect = org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect
    username = "username"
    password = "password"
    properties {
       // Documentation for Tomcat JDBC Pool
       // http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/jdbc-pool.html#Common_Attributes
       // https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/api/org/apache/tomcat/jdbc/pool/PoolConfiguration.html
       jmxEnabled = true
       initialSize = 5
       maxActive = 50
       minIdle = 5
       maxIdle = 25
       maxWait = 10000
       maxAge = 10 * 60000
       timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis = 5000
       minEvictableIdleTimeMillis = 60000
       validationQuery = "SELECT 1"
       validationQueryTimeout = 3
       validationInterval = 15000
       testOnBorrow = true
       testWhileIdle = true
       testOnReturn = false
       ignoreExceptionOnPreLoad = true
       // http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/jdbc-pool.html#JDBC_interceptors
       jdbcInterceptors = "ConnectionState;StatementCache(max=200)"
       defaultTransactionIsolation = java.sql.Connection.TRANSACTION_READ_COMMITTED // safe default
       // controls for leaked connections 
       abandonWhenPercentageFull = 100 // settings are active only when pool is full
       removeAbandonedTimeout = 120
       removeAbandoned = true
       // use JMX console to change this setting at runtime
       logAbandoned = false // causes stacktrace recording overhead, use only for debugging
       // JDBC driver properties
       // Mysql as example
       dbProperties {
           // Mysql specific driver properties
           // http://dev.mysql.com/doc/connector-j/en/connector-j-reference-configuration-properties.html
           // let Tomcat JDBC Pool handle reconnecting
           autoReconnect=false
           // truncation behaviour 
           jdbcCompliantTruncation=false
           // mysql 0-date conversion
           zeroDateTimeBehavior='convertToNull'
           // Tomcat JDBC Pool's StatementCache is used instead, so disable mysql driver's cache
           cachePrepStmts=false
           cacheCallableStmts=false
           // Tomcat JDBC Pool's StatementFinalizer keeps track
           dontTrackOpenResources=true
           // performance optimization: reduce number of SQLExceptions thrown in mysql driver code
           holdResultsOpenOverStatementClose=true
           // enable MySQL query cache - using server prep stmts will disable query caching
           useServerPrepStmts=false
           // metadata caching
           cacheServerConfiguration=true
           cacheResultSetMetadata=true
           metadataCacheSize=100
           // timeouts for TCP/IP
           connectTimeout=15000
           socketTimeout=120000
           // timer tuning (disable)
           maintainTimeStats=false
           enableQueryTimeouts=false
           // misc tuning
           noDatetimeStringSync=true
       }
    }
}

More on dbCreate

Hibernate can automatically create the database tables required for your domain model. You have some control over when and how it does this through the dbCreate property, which can take these values:

• create - Drops the existing schema and creates the schema on startup, dropping existing tables, indexes, etc. first.
• create-drop - Same as create, but also drops the tables when the application shuts down cleanly.
• update - Creates missing tables and indexes, and updates the current schema without dropping any tables or data. Note that this can't properly handle many schema changes like column renames (you're left with the old column containing the existing data).
• validate - Makes no changes to your database. Compares the configuration with the existing database schema and reports warnings.
• any other value - does nothing

You can also remove the dbCreate setting completely, which is recommended once your schema is relatively stable and definitely when your application and database are deployed in production. Database changes are then managed through proper migrations, either with SQL scripts or a migration tool like Liquibase (the Database Migration plugin uses Liquibase and is tightly integrated with Grails and GORM).

4.4.1 DataSources and Environments

Grails' DataSource definition is "environment aware", however, so you can do:

dataSource {
    pooled = true
    driverClassName = "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
    dialect = org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect
    // other common settings here
}
environments {
    production {
        dataSource {
            url = "jdbc:mysql://liveip.com/liveDb"
            // other environment-specific settings here
        }
    }
}

4.4.2 Automatic Database Migration

• create
• create-drop
• update
• validate
• no value

In development mode dbCreate is by default set to "create-drop", but at some point in development (and certainly once you go to production) you'll need to stop dropping and re-creating the database every time you start up your server.

It's tempting to switch to update so you retain existing data and only update the schema when your code changes, but Hibernate's update support is very conservative. It won't make any changes that could result in data loss, and doesn't detect renamed columns or tables, so you'll be left with the old one and will also have the new one.

Grails supports migrations with Flyway or Liquibase using the same mechanism provided by Spring Boot.

4.4.3 Transaction-aware DataSource Proxy

If this were not the case, then retrieving a connection from the dataSource would be a new connection, and you wouldn't be able to see changes that haven't been committed yet (assuming you have a sensible transaction isolation setting, e.g. READ_COMMITTED or better).

The "real" unproxied dataSource is still available to you if you need access to it; its bean name is dataSourceUnproxied.

You can access this bean like any other Spring bean, i.e. using dependency injection:

class MyService {
   def dataSourceUnproxied
   …
}

or by pulling it from the ApplicationContext:

def dataSourceUnproxied = ctx.dataSourceUnproxied

4.4.4 Database Console

You can access the console by navigating to http://localhost:8080/appname/dbconsole in a browser. The URI can be configured using the grails.dbconsole.urlRoot attribute in Config.groovy and defaults to '/dbconsole'.

The console is enabled by default in development mode and can be disabled or enabled in other environments by using the grails.dbconsole.enabled attribute in Config.groovy. For example you could enable the console in production using

environments {
    production {
        grails.serverURL = "http://www.changeme.com"
        grails.dbconsole.enabled = true
        grails.dbconsole.urlRoot = '/admin/dbconsole'
    }
    development {
        grails.serverURL = "http://localhost:8080/${appName}"
    }
    test {
        grails.serverURL = "http://localhost:8080/${appName}"
    }
}

If you enable the console in production be sure to guard access to it using a trusted security framework.

Configuration

By default the console is configured for an H2 database which will work with the default settings if you haven't configured an external database - you just need to change the JDBC URL to jdbc:h2:mem:devDB. If you've configured an external database (e.g. MySQL, Oracle, etc.) then you can use the Saved Settings dropdown to choose a settings template and fill in the url and username/password information from your DataSource.groovy.

4.4.5 Multiple Datasources

Configuring Additional DataSources

The default DataSource configuration in grails-app/conf/DataSource.groovy looks something like this:

---
dataSource:
    pooled: true
    jmxExport: true
    driverClassName: org.h2.Driver
    username: sa
    password:
environments:
    development:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: create-drop
            url: jdbc:h2:mem:devDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
    test:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: update
            url: jdbc:h2:mem:testDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
    production:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: update
            url: jdbc:h2:prodDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
            properties:
               jmxEnabled: true
               initialSize: 5

This configures a single DataSource with the Spring bean named dataSource. To configure extra DataSources, add a dataSources block (at the top level, in an environment block, or both, just like the standard DataSource definition) with a custom name. For example, this configuration adds a second DataSource, using MySQL in the development environment and Oracle in production:

---
dataSources:
    dataSource:
        pooled: true
        jmxExport: true
        driverClassName: org.h2.Driver
        username: sa
        password:
    lookup:
        dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLInnoDBDialect
        driverClassName: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
        username: lookup
        password: secret
        url: jdbc:mysql://localhost/lookup
        dbCreate: update
environments:
    development:
        dataSources:
            dataSource:
                dbCreate: create-drop
                url: jdbc:h2:mem:devDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
    test:
        dataSources:
            dataSource:
                dbCreate: update
                url: jdbc:h2:mem:testDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
    production:
        dataSources:
            dataSource:
                dbCreate: update
                url: jdbc:h2:prodDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
                properties:
                   jmxEnabled: true
                   initialSize: 5
                   …
            lookup:
                dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle10gDialect
                driverClassName: oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver
                username: lookup
                password: secret
                url: jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:lookup
                dbCreate: update

You can use the same or different databases as long as they're supported by Hibernate.

Configuring Domain Classes

If a domain class has no DataSource configuration, it defaults to the standard 'dataSource'. Set the datasource property in the mapping block to configure a non-default DataSource. For example, if you want to use the ZipCode domain to use the 'lookup' DataSource, configure it like this;

class ZipCode {
   String code
   static mapping = {
      datasource 'lookup'
   }
}

A domain class can also use two or more DataSources. Use the datasources property with a list of names to configure more than one, for example:

class ZipCode {
   String code
   static mapping = {
      datasources(['lookup', 'auditing'])
   }
}

If a domain class uses the default DataSource and one or more others, use the special name 'DEFAULT' to indicate the default DataSource:

class ZipCode {
   String code
   static mapping = {
      datasources(['lookup', 'DEFAULT'])
   }
}

If a domain class uses all configured DataSources use the special value 'ALL':

class ZipCode {
   String code
   static mapping = {
      datasource 'ALL'
   }
}

Namespaces and GORM Methods

If a domain class uses more than one DataSource then you can use the namespace implied by each DataSource name to make GORM calls for a particular DataSource. For example, consider this class which uses two DataSources:

class ZipCode {
   String code
   static mapping = {
      datasources(['lookup', 'auditing'])
   }
}

The first DataSource specified is the default when not using an explicit namespace, so in this case we default to 'lookup'. But you can call GORM methods on the 'auditing' DataSource with the DataSource name, for example:

def zipCode = ZipCode.auditing.get(42)
…
zipCode.auditing.save()

As you can see, you add the DataSource to the method call in both the static case and the instance case.

Hibernate Mapped Domain Classes

You can also partition annotated Java classes into separate datasources. Classes using the default datasource are registered in grails-app/conf/hibernate/hibernate.cfg.xml. To specify that an annotated class uses a non-default datasource, create a hibernate.cfg.xml file for that datasource with the file name prefixed with the datasource name.

For example if the Book class is in the default datasource, you would register that in grails-app/conf/hibernate/hibernate.cfg.xml:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<!DOCTYPE hibernate-configuration PUBLIC
          '-//Hibernate/Hibernate Configuration DTD 3.0//EN'
          'http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-configuration-3.0.dtd'>
<hibernate-configuration>
   <session-factory>
      <mapping class='org.example.Book'/>
   </session-factory>
</hibernate-configuration>

and if the Library class is in the "ds2" datasource, you would register that in grails-app/conf/hibernate/ds2_hibernate.cfg.xml:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<!DOCTYPE hibernate-configuration PUBLIC
          '-//Hibernate/Hibernate Configuration DTD 3.0//EN'
          'http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-configuration-3.0.dtd'>
<hibernate-configuration>
   <session-factory>
      <mapping class='org.example.Library'/>
   </session-factory>
</hibernate-configuration>

The process is the same for classes mapped with hbm.xml files - just list them in the appropriate hibernate.cfg.xml file.

Services

Like Domain classes, by default Services use the default DataSource and PlatformTransactionManager. To configure a Service to use a different DataSource, use the static datasource property, for example:

class DataService {
   static datasource = 'lookup'
   void someMethod(...) {
      …
   }
}

A transactional service can only use a single DataSource, so be sure to only make changes for domain classes whose DataSource is the same as the Service.

Note that the datasource specified in a service has no bearing on which datasources are used for domain classes; that's determined by their declared datasources in the domain classes themselves. It's used to declare which transaction manager to use.

What you'll see is that if you have a Foo domain class in dataSource1 and a Bar domain class in dataSource2, and WahooService uses dataSource1, a service method that saves a new Foo and a new Bar will only be transactional for Foo since they share the datasource. The transaction won't affect the Bar instance. If you want both to be transactional you'd need to use two services and XA datasources for two-phase commit, e.g. with the Atomikos plugin.

Transactions across multiple datasources

Grails uses the Best Efforts 1PC pattern for handling transactions across multiple datasources.

The Best Efforts 1PC pattern is fairly general but can fail in some circumstances that the developer must be aware of. This is a non-XA pattern that involves a synchronized single-phase commit of a number of resources. Because the 2PC is not used, it can never be as safe as an XA transaction, but is often good enough if the participants are aware of the compromises.

The basic idea is to delay the commit of all resources as late as possible in a transaction so that the only thing that can go wrong is an infrastructure failure (not a business-processing error). Systems that rely on Best Efforts 1PC reason that infrastructure failures are rare enough that they can afford to take the risk in return for higher throughput. If business-processing services are also designed to be idempotent, then little can go wrong in practice.

The BE1PC implementation was added in Grails 2.3.6. . Before this change additional datasources didn't take part in transactions initiated in Grails. The transactions in additional datasources were basically in auto commit mode. In some cases this might be the wanted behavior. One reason might be performance: on the start of each new transaction, the BE1PC transaction manager creates a new transaction to each datasource. It's possible to leave an additional datasource out of the BE1PC transaction manager by setting transactional = false in the respective configuration block of the additional dataSource. Datasources with readOnly = true will also be left out of the chained transaction manager (since 2.3.7).

By default, the BE1PC implementation will add all beans implementing the Spring PlatformTransactionManager interface to the chained BE1PC transaction manager. For example, a possible JMSTransactionManager bean in the Grails application context would be added to the Grails BE1PC transaction manager's chain of transaction managers.

You can exclude transaction manager beans from the BE1PC implementation with the this configuration option:

grails.transaction.chainedTransactionManagerPostProcessor.blacklistPattern = '.*'

XA and Two-phase Commit

When the Best Efforts 1PC pattern isn't suitable for handling transactions across multiple transactional resources (not only datasources), there are several options available for adding XA/2PC support to Grails applications.

The Spring transactions documentation contains information about integrating the JTA/XA transaction manager of different application servers. In this case, you can configure a bean with the name transactionManager manually in resources.groovy or resources.xml file.

There is also Atomikos plugin available for XA support in Grails applications.

4.5 Versioning

Detecting Versions at Runtime

You can detect the application version using Grails' support for application metadata using the GrailsApplication class. For example within controllers there is an implicit grailsApplication variable that can be used:

def version = grailsApplication.metadata.getApplicationVersion()

You can retrieve the version of Grails that is running with:

def grailsVersion = grailsApplication.metadata.getGrailsVersion()

or the GrailsUtil class:

import grails.util.GrailsUtil
…
def grailsVersion = GrailsUtil.grailsVersion

4.6 Project Documentation

The documentation engine uses a variation on the Textile syntax to automatically create project documentation with smart linking, formatting etc.

Creating project documentation

To use the engine you need to follow a few conventions. First, you need to create a src/docs/guide directory where your documentation source files will go. Then, you need to create the source docs themselves. Each chapter should have its own gdoc file as should all numbered sub-sections. You will end up with something like:

+ src/docs/guide/introduction.gdoc
+ src/docs/guide/introduction/changes.gdoc
+ src/docs/guide/gettingStarted.gdoc
+ src/docs/guide/configuration.gdoc
+ src/docs/guide/configuration/build.gdoc
+ src/docs/guide/configuration/build/controllers.gdoc

Note that you can have all your gdoc files in the top-level directory if you want, but you can also put sub-sections in sub-directories named after the parent section - as the above example shows.

Once you have your source files, you still need to tell the documentation engine what the structure of your user guide is going to be. To do that, you add a src/docs/guide/toc.yml file that contains the structure and titles for each section. This file is in YAML format and basically represents the structure of the user guide in tree form. For example, the above files could be represented as:

introduction:
  title: Introduction
  changes: Change Log
gettingStarted: Getting Started
configuration:
  title: Configuration
  build:
    title: Build Config
    controllers: Specifying Controllers

The format is pretty straightforward. Any section that has sub-sections is represented with the corresponding filename (minus the .gdoc extension) followed by a colon. The next line should contain title: plus the title of the section as seen by the end user. Every sub-section then has its own line after the title. Leaf nodes, i.e. those without any sub-sections, declare their title on the same line as the section name but after the colon.

That's it. You can easily add, remove, and move sections within the toc.yml to restructure the generated user guide. You should also make sure that all section names, i.e. the gdoc filenames, should be unique since they are used for creating internal links and for the HTML filenames. Don't worry though, the documentation engine will warn you of duplicate section names.

Creating reference items

Reference items appear in the Quick Reference section of the documentation. Each reference item belongs to a category and a category is a directory located in the src/docs/ref directory. For example, suppose you have defined a new controller method called renderPDF. That belongs to the Controllers category so you would create a gdoc text file at the following location:

+ src/docs/ref/Controllers/renderPDF.gdoc

Configuring Output Properties

There are various properties you can set within your grails-app/conf/Config.groovy file that customize the output of the documentation such as:

• grails.doc.title - The title of the documentation
• grails.doc.subtitle - The subtitle of the documentation
• grails.doc.authors - The authors of the documentation
• grails.doc.license - The license of the software
• grails.doc.copyright - The copyright message to display
• grails.doc.footer - The footer to use

Other properties such as the version are pulled from your project itself. If a title is not specified, the application name is used.

You can also customise the look of the documentation and provide images by setting a few other options:

• grails.doc.css - The location of a directory containing custom CSS files (type java.io.File)
• grails.doc.js - The location of a directory containing custom JavaScript files (type java.io.File)
• grails.doc.style - The location of a directory containing custom HTML templates for the guide (type java.io.File)
• grails.doc.images - The location of a directory containing image files for use in the style templates and within the documentation pages themselves (type java.io.File)

One of the simplest ways to customise the look of the generated guide is to provide a value for grails.doc.css and then put a custom.css file in the corresponding directory. Grails will automatically include this CSS file in the guide. You can also place a custom-pdf.css file in that directory. This allows you to override the styles for the PDF version of the guide.

Generating Documentation

Once you have created some documentation (refer to the syntax guide in the next chapter) you can generate an HTML version of the documentation using the command:

grails doc

This command will output an docs/manual/index.html which can be opened in a browser to view your documentation.

Documentation Syntax

As mentioned the syntax is largely similar to Textile or Confluence style wiki markup. The following sections walk you through the syntax basics.

Basic Formatting

Monospace: monospace

@monospace@

Italic: italic

_italic_

Bold: bold

*bold*

Image:

!http://grails.org/images/new/grailslogo_topNav.png!

You can also link to internal images like so:

!someFolder/my_diagram.png!

This will link to an image stored locally within your project. There is currently no default location for doc images, but you can specify one with the grails.doc.images setting in Config.groovy like so:

grails.doc.images = new File("src/docs/images")

In this example, you would put the my_diagram.png file in the directory 'src/docs/images/someFolder'.

Linking

There are several ways to create links with the documentation generator. A basic external link can either be defined using confluence or textile style markup:

[Pivotal|http://www.pivotal.io/oss]

or

"Pivotal":http://www.pivotal.io/oss

For links to other sections inside the user guide you can use the guide: prefix with the name of the section you want to link to:

[Intro|guide:introduction]

The section name comes from the corresponding gdoc filename. The documentation engine will warn you if any links to sections in your guide break.

To link to reference items you can use a special syntax:

[renderPDF|controllers]

In this case the category of the reference item is on the right hand side of the | and the name of the reference item on the left.

Finally, to link to external APIs you can use the api: prefix. For example:

[String|api:java.lang.String]

The documentation engine will automatically create the appropriate javadoc link in this case. To add additional APIs to the engine you can configure them in grails-app/conf/Config.groovy. For example:

grails.doc.api.org.hibernate=
            "http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/core/javadocs"

The above example configures classes within the org.hibernate package to link to the Hibernate website's API docs.

Lists and Headings

Headings can be created by specifying the letter 'h' followed by a number and then a dot:

h3.<space>Heading3
h4.<space>Heading4

Unordered lists are defined with the use of the * character:

* item 1
** subitem 1
** subitem 2
* item 2

Numbered lists can be defined with the # character:

# item 1

Tables can be created using the table macro:

{table}
 *Name* | *Number*
 Albert | 46
 Wilma | 1348
 James | 12
{table}

Code and Notes

You can define code blocks with the code macro:

class Book {
    String title
}

{code}
class Book {
    String title
}
{code}

The example above provides syntax highlighting for Java and Groovy code, but you can also highlight XML markup:

<hello>world</hello>

{code:xml}
<hello>world</hello>
{code}

There are also a couple of macros for displaying notes and warnings:

Note:

This is a note!

{note}
This is a note!
{note}

Warning:

This is a warning!

{warning}
This is a warning!
{warning}

4.7 Dependency Resolution

5 The Command Line

When you type:

grails [command name]

Grails searches the profile repository based on the profile of the current application. If the profile is for a web application then commmands a read from the web profile and the base profile which it inherits from.

Since command behavior is profile specific the web profile my provide different behavior for the run-app command then say a profile for running batch applications.

When you type the following command:

grails run-app

It results in a search for the following files:

• PROJECT_HOME/scripts/RunApp.groovy
• PROFILE_REPOSITORY_PATH/profiles/web/commands/run-app.groovy (if the web profile is active)
• PROFILE_REPOSITORY_PATH/profiles/web/commands/run-app.yml (for YAML defined commands)

To get a list of all commands and some help about the available commands type:

grails help

which outputs usage instructions and the list of commands Grails is aware of:

grails [environment]* [target] [arguments]*'
| Examples:
$ grails dev run-app
$ grails create-app books
| Available Commands (type grails help 'command-name' for more info):
| Command Name                          Command Description
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
clean                                   Cleans a Grails application's compiled sources
compile                                 Compiles a Grails application
...

Refer to the Command Line reference in the Quick Reference menu of the reference guide for more information about individual commands

non-interactive mode

When you run a script manually and it prompts you for information, you can answer the questions and continue running the script. But when you run a script as part of an automated process, for example a continuous integration build server, there's no way to "answer" the questions. So you can pass the --non-interactive switch to the script command to tell Grails to accept the default answer for any questions, for example whether to install a missing plugin.

For example:

grails war --non-interactive

5.1 Interactive Mode

If you need to open a file whilst within interactive mode you can use the open command which will TAB complete file paths:

Even better, the open command understands the logical aliases 'test-report' and 'dep-report', which will open the most recent test and dependency reports respectively. In other words, to open the test report in a browser simply execute open test-report. You can even open multiple files at once: open test-report test/unit/MyTests.groovy will open the HTML test report in your browser and the MyTests.groovy source file in your text editor.

TAB completion also works for class names after the create-* commands:

If you need to run an external process whilst interactive mode is running you can do so by starting the command with a !:

Note that with ! (bang) commands, you get file path auto completion - ideal for external commands that operate on the file system such as 'ls', 'cat', 'git', etc.

To exit interactive mode enter the exit command. Note that if the Grails application has been run with run-app normally it will terminate when the interactive mode console exits because the JVM will be terminated. An exception to this would be if the application were running in forked mode which means the application is running in a different JVM. In that case the application will be left running after the interactive mode console terminates. If you want to exit interactive mode and stop an application that is running in forked mode, use the quit command. The quit command will stop the running application and then close interactive mode.

5.2 The Command Line and Profiles

grails create-app myapp

You can specify a different profile with the profile argument:

grails create-app myapp --profile=web-plugin

Profiles encapsulate the project commands, templates and plugins that are designed to work for a given profile. They are stored in the Grails Profile Repository on Github.

This repository is checked out locally and stored in the USER_HOME/.grails/repository directory.

Understanding a Profile's Structure

A profile is a simple directory that contains a profile.yml file and directorys containing the "commands", "skeleton" and "templates" defined by the profile. Example:

web
    * commands
        * create-controller.yml
        * run-app.groovy    
        …
    * skeleton
        * grails-app
            * controllers
            …
        * build.gradle
    * templates
        * artifacts
            * Controller.groovy
    * profile.yml

The above example is a snippet of structure of the 'web' profile. The profile.yml file is defined as follows:

description: Profile for Web applications
extends: base

As you can see it contains the description of the profile and a definition of which profiles this profile extends, since one profile can extend from another.

When the create-app command runs it takes the skeleton of the parent profiles and copies the skeletons into a new project structure. Child profiles overwrite files from the parent profile so if the parent defines a build.gradle then the child profile will override the parent.

Defining Profile Commands

A profile can define new commands that apply only to that profile using YAML or Groovy scripts. Below is an example of the create-controller command defined in YAML:

description: 
    - Creates a controller
    - usage: 'create-controller [controller name]'
    - completer: org.grails.cli.interactive.completers.DomainClassCompleter
    - argument: "Controller Name"
      description: "The name of the controller"     
steps:
 - command: render
   template: templates/artifacts/Controller.groovy
   destination: grails-app/controllers/artifact.package.path/artifact.nameController.groovy
 - command: render
   template: templates/testing/Controller.groovy
   destination: src/test/groovy/artifact.package.path/artifact.nameControllerSpec.groovy
 - command: mkdir
   location: grails-app/views/artifact.propertyName

Commands defined in YAML must define one or many steps. Each step is a command in itself. The available step types are:

• render - To render a template to a given destination (as seen in the previous example)
• mkdir - To make a directory specified by the location parameter
• execute - To execute a command specified by the class parameter. Must be a class that implements the Command interface.
• gradle - To execute one or many Gradle tasks specified by the tasks parameter.

For example to invoke a Gradle task, you can define the following YAML:

description: Creates a WAR file for deployment to a container (like Tomcat)
minArguments: 0
usage: |
 war
steps:
 - command: gradle
   tasks:
     - war

If you need more flexiblity than what the declarative YAML approach provides you can create Groovy script commands. Each Command script is extends from the GroovyScriptCommmand class and hence has all of the methods of that class available to it.

The following is an example of the create-script command written in Groovy:

description( "Creates a Grails script" ) {
  usage "grails create-script [SCRIPT NAME]"
  argument name:'Script Name', description:"The name of the script to create"
  flag name:'force', description:"Whether to overwrite existing files"
}
def scriptName = args[0]
def model = model(scriptName)
def overwrite = flag('force') ? true : false
render  template: template('artifacts/Script.groovy'), 
        destination: file("src/main/scripts/${model.lowerCaseName}.groovy"),
        model: model,
        overwrite: overwrite

For more information on creating Groovy commands see the following section on creating custom Grails scripts.

5.3 Creating Custom Scripts

grails create-script hello-world

Will create a script called src/main/scripts/hello-world.groovy. Each Command script is extends from the GroovyScriptCommmand class and hence has all of the methods of that class available to it.

In general Grails scripts should be used for scripting the Gradle based build system and code generation. Scripts cannot load application classes and in fact should not since Gradle is required to construct the application classpath.

See below for an example script that prints 'Hello World':

description "Example description", "grails hello-world"
println "Hello World"

The description method is used to define the output seen by grails help and to aid users of the script. The following is a more complete example of providing a description taken from the generate-all command:

description( "Generates a controller that performs CRUD operations and the associated views" ) {
  usage "grails generate-all [DOMAIN CLASS]"
  flag name:'force', description:"Whether to overwrite existing files"
  argument name:'Domain Class', description:'The name of the domain class'
}

As you can see this description profiles usage instructions, a flag and an argument. This allows the command to be used as follows:

grails generate-all MyClass --force

5.4 Re-using Grails scripts

Any script you create an invoke another Grails script simply by invoking a method:

testApp()

The above will invoke the test-app command. You can also pass arguments using the method arguments:

testApp('--debug-jvm')

Invoking Gradle

Instead of invoking another Grails CLI command you can invoke Gradle directory using the gradle property.

gradle.compileGroovy()

Invoking Ant

You can also invoke Ant tasks from scripts which can help if you need to writing code generation and automation tasks:

ant.mkdir(dir:"path")

Template Generation

Plugins and applications that need to define template generation tasks can do so using scripts. A example of this is the Scaffolding plugin which defines the generate-all and generate-controllers commands.

Every Grails script implements the TemplateRenderer interface which makes it trivial to render templates to the users project workspace.

The following is an example of the create-script command written in Groovy:

description( "Creates a Grails script" ) {
  usage "grails create-script [SCRIPT NAME]"
  argument name:'Script Name', description:"The name of the script to create"
  flag name:'force', description:"Whether to overwrite existing files"
}
def scriptName = args[0]
def model = model(scriptName)
def overwrite = flag('force') ? true : false
render  template: template('artifacts/Script.groovy'), 
        destination: file("src/main/scripts/${model.lowerCaseName}.groovy"),
        model: model,
        overwrite: overwrite

5.5 Building with Gradle

The build is defined by the build.gradle file which specifies the version of your project, the dependencies of the project and the repositories where to find those dependencies (amongst other things).

When you invoke the grails command the version of Gradle that ships with Grails 3.0 (currently 2.3) is invoked by the grails process via the Gradle Tooling API:

# Equivalent to 'gradle classes'
$ grails compile

You can invoke Gradle directly using the gradle command and use your own local version of Gradle, however you will need Gradle 2.2 or above to work with Grails 3.0:

$ gradle assemble

5.5.1 Defining Dependencies with Gradle

The default dependencies for the "web" profile can be seen below:

dependencies {
  compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-logging'
  compile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-actuator')
  compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-autoconfigure'
  compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-tomcat'
  compile 'org.grails:grails-dependencies'
  compile 'org.grails:grails-web-boot'
  compile 'org.grails.plugins:hibernate'
  compile 'org.grails.plugins:cache'
  compile 'org.hibernate:hibernate-ehcache'
  runtime 'org.grails.plugins:asset-pipeline'
  runtime 'org.grails.plugins:scaffolding'
  testCompile "org.grails:grails-plugin-testing'
  testCompile "org.grails.plugins:geb'
  // Note: It is recommended to update to a more robust driver (Chrome, Firefox etc.)
  testRuntime 'org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-htmlunit-driver:2.44.0'
  console 'org.grails:grails-console'
}

Note that version numbers are not present in the majority of the dependencies. This is thanks to the dependency management plugin which configures a Maven BOM that defines the default dependency versions for certain commonly used dependencies and plugins:

dependencyManagement {
    imports {
        mavenBom 'org.grails:grails-bom:' + grailsVersion
    }
    applyMavenExclusions false
}

5.5.2 Working with Gradle Tasks

You can invoke any of these Grails commands using their Gradle equivalents if you prefer:

$ gradle test

Note however that you will need to use a version of Gradle compatible with Grails 3.0 (Gradle 2.2 or above). If you wish to invoke a Gradle task using the version of Gradle used by Grails you can do so with the grails command:

$ grails gradle compileGroovy

However, it is recommended you do this via interactive mode, as it greatly speeds up execution and provides TAB completion for the available Gradle tasks:

$ grails 
| Enter a command name to run. Use TAB for completion:
 grails> gradle compileGroovy
 ...

To find out what Gradle tasks are available without using interactive mode TAB completion you can use the Gradle tasks task:

gradle tasks

5.5.3 Grails plugins for Gradle

plugins {
    id "io.spring.dependency-management" version "0.3.1.RELEASE"
}
apply plugin: "spring-boot"
apply plugin: "war"
apply plugin: "asset-pipeline"
apply plugin: "org.grails.grails-web"
apply plugin: "org.grails.grails-gsp"
apply plugin: "maven"

The default plugins are as follows:

• dependency-management - The dependency management plugin allows Gradle to read Maven BOM files that define the default dependency versions used by Grails.
• spring-boot - The Spring Boot Gradle plugin enhances the default packaging tasks provided by Gradle to allow for the creation of runnable JAR/WAR files.
• war - The WAR plugin changes the packaging so that Gradle creates as WAR file from you application. You can comment out this plugin if you wish to create only a runnable JAR file for standalone deployment.
• asset-pipeline - The asset pipeline plugin enables the compilation of static assets (JavaScript, CSS etc.)
• maven - The maven plugin allows installing your application into a local maven repository

Many of these are built in plugins provided by Gradle or third party plugins. The Gradle plugins that Grails provides are as follows:

• org.grails.grails-core - The primary Grails plugin for Gradle, included by all other plugins and designed to operate with all profiles.
• org.grails.grails-plugin - A plugin for Gradle for building Grails plugins.
• org.grails.grails-web - The Grails Web gradle plugin configures Gradle to understand the Grails conventions and directory structure.
• org.grails.grails-gsp - The Grails GSP plugin adds precompilation of GSP files for production deployments.
• org.grails.grails-doc - A plugin for Gradle for using Grails 2.0's documentation engine.

6 Object Relational Mapping (GORM)

GORM is Grails' object relational mapping (ORM) implementation. Under the hood it uses Hibernate 3 (a very popular and flexible open source ORM solution) and thanks to the dynamic nature of Groovy with its static and dynamic typing, along with the convention of Grails, there is far less configuration involved in creating Grails domain classes.

You can also write Grails domain classes in Java. See the section on Hibernate Integration for how to write domain classes in Java but still use dynamic persistent methods. Below is a preview of GORM in action:

def book = Book.findByTitle("Groovy in Action")
book
  .addToAuthors(name:"Dierk Koenig")
  .addToAuthors(name:"Guillaume LaForge")
  .save()

6.1 Quick Start Guide

grails create-domain-class helloworld.Person

If no package is specified with the create-domain-class script, Grails automatically uses the application name as the package name.

This will create a class at the location grails-app/domain/helloworld/Person.groovy such as the one below:

package helloworld
class Person {
}

If you have the dbCreate property set to "update", "create" or "create-drop" on your DataSource, Grails will automatically generate/modify the database tables for you.

You can customize the class by adding properties:

class Person {
    String name
    Integer age
    Date lastVisit
}

Once you have a domain class try and manipulate it with the shell or console by typing:

grails console

This loads an interactive GUI where you can run Groovy commands with access to the Spring ApplicationContext, GORM, etc.

6.1.1 Basic CRUD

Create

To create a domain class use Map constructor to set its properties and call save:

def p = new Person(name: "Fred", age: 40, lastVisit: new Date())
p.save()

The save method will persist your class to the database using the underlying Hibernate ORM layer.

Read

Grails transparently adds an implicit id property to your domain class which you can use for retrieval:

def p = Person.get(1)
assert 1 == p.id

This uses the get method that expects a database identifier to read the Person object back from the database. You can also load an object in a read-only state by using the read method:

def p = Person.read(1)

In this case the underlying Hibernate engine will not do any dirty checking and the object will not be persisted. Note that if you explicitly call the save method then the object is placed back into a read-write state.

In addition, you can also load a proxy for an instance by using the load method:

def p = Person.load(1)

This incurs no database access until a method other than getId() is called. Hibernate then initializes the proxied instance, or throws an exception if no record is found for the specified id.

Update

To update an instance, change some properties and then call save again:

def p = Person.get(1)
p.name = "Bob"
p.save()

Delete

To delete an instance use the delete method:

def p = Person.get(1)
p.delete()

6.2 Domain Modelling in GORM

These are modeled in GORM as Groovy classes, so a Book class may have a title, a release date, an ISBN number and so on. The next few sections show how to model the domain in GORM.

To create a domain class you run the create-domain-class command as follows:

grails create-domain-class org.bookstore.Book

The result will be a class at grails-app/domain/org/bookstore/Book.groovy:

package org.bookstore
class Book {
}

This class will map automatically to a table in the database called book (the same name as the class). This behaviour is customizable through the ORM Domain Specific Language

Now that you have a domain class you can define its properties as Java types. For example:

package org.bookstore
class Book {
    String title
    Date releaseDate
    String ISBN
}

Each property is mapped to a column in the database, where the convention for column names is all lower case separated by underscores. For example releaseDate maps onto a column release_date. The SQL types are auto-detected from the Java types, but can be customized with Constraints or the ORM DSL.

6.2.1 Association in GORM

6.2.1.1 Many-to-one and one-to-one

Example A

class Face {
    Nose nose
}

class Nose {
}

In this case we have a unidirectional many-to-one relationship from Face to Nose. To make this relationship bidirectional define the other side as follows (and see the section on controlling the ends of the association just below):

Example B

class Face {
    Nose nose
}

class Nose {
    static belongsTo = [face:Face]
}

In this case we use the belongsTo setting to say that Nose "belongs to" Face. The result of this is that we can create a Face, attach a Nose instance to it and when we save or delete the Face instance, GORM will save or delete the Nose. In other words, saves and deletes will cascade from Face to the associated Nose:

new Face(nose:new Nose()).save()

The example above will save both face and nose. Note that the inverse is not true and will result in an error due to a transient Face:

new Nose(face:new Face()).save() // will cause an error

Now if we delete the Face instance, the Nose will go too:

def f = Face.get(1)
f.delete() // both Face and Nose deleted

To make the relationship a true one-to-one, use the hasOne property on the owning side, e.g. Face:

Example C

class Face {
    static hasOne = [nose:Nose]
}

class Nose {
    Face face
}

Note that using this property puts the foreign key on the inverse table to the example A, so in this case the foreign key column is stored in the nose table inside a column called face_id. Also, hasOne only works with bidirectional relationships.

Finally, it's a good idea to add a unique constraint on one side of the one-to-one relationship:

class Face {
    static hasOne = [nose:Nose]
    static constraints = {
        nose unique: true
    }
}

class Nose {
    Face face
}

Controlling the ends of the association

Occasionally you may find yourself with domain classes that have multiple properties of the same type. They may even be self-referential, i.e. the association property has the same type as the domain class it's in. Such situations can cause problems because Grails may guess incorrectly the type of the association. Consider this simple class:

class Person {
    String name
    Person parent
    static belongsTo = [ supervisor: Person ]
    static constraints = { supervisor nullable: true }
}

As far as Grails is concerned, the parent and supervisor properties are two directions of the same association. So when you set the parent property on a Person instance, Grails will automatically set the supervisor property on the other Person instance. This may be what you want, but if you look at the class, what we in fact have are two unidirectional relationships.

To guide Grails to the correct mapping, you can tell it that a particular association is unidirectional through the mappedBy property:

class Person {
    String name
    Person parent
    static belongsTo = [ supervisor: Person ]
    static mappedBy = [ supervisor: "none", parent: "none" ]
    static constraints = { supervisor nullable: true }
}

You can also replace "none" with any property name of the target class. And of course this works for normal domain classes too, not just self-referential ones. Nor is the mappedBy property limited to many-to-one and one-to-one associations: it also works for one-to-many and many-to-many associations as you'll see in the next section.

If you have a property called "none" on your domain class, this approach won't work currently! The "none" property will be treated as the reverse direction of the association (or the "back reference"). Fortunately, "none" is not a common domain class property name.

6.2.1.2 One-to-many

class Author {
    static hasMany = [books: Book]
    String name
}

class Book {
    String title
}

In this case we have a unidirectional one-to-many. Grails will, by default, map this kind of relationship with a join table.

The ORM DSL allows mapping unidirectional relationships using a foreign key association instead

Grails will automatically inject a property of type java.util.Set into the domain class based on the hasMany setting. This can be used to iterate over the collection:

def a = Author.get(1)
for (book in a.books) {
    println book.title
}

The default fetch strategy used by Grails is "lazy", which means that the collection will be lazily initialized on first access. This can lead to the n+1 problem if you are not careful.

If you need "eager" fetching you can use the ORM DSL or specify eager fetching as part of a query

The default cascading behaviour is to cascade saves and updates, but not deletes unless a belongsTo is also specified:

class Author {
    static hasMany = [books: Book]
    String name
}

class Book {
    static belongsTo = [author: Author]
    String title
}

If you have two properties of the same type on the many side of a one-to-many you have to use mappedBy to specify which the collection is mapped:

class Airport {
    static hasMany = [flights: Flight]
    static mappedBy = [flights: "departureAirport"]
}

class Flight {
    Airport departureAirport
    Airport destinationAirport
}

This is also true if you have multiple collections that map to different properties on the many side:

class Airport {
    static hasMany = [outboundFlights: Flight, inboundFlights: Flight]
    static mappedBy = [outboundFlights: "departureAirport",
                       inboundFlights: "destinationAirport"]
}

class Flight {
    Airport departureAirport
    Airport destinationAirport
}

6.2.1.3 Many-to-many

class Book {
    static belongsTo = Author
    static hasMany = [authors:Author]
    String title
}

class Author {
    static hasMany = [books:Book]
    String name
}

Grails maps a many-to-many using a join table at the database level. The owning side of the relationship, in this case Author, takes responsibility for persisting the relationship and is the only side that can cascade saves across.

For example this will work and cascade saves:

new Author(name:"Stephen King")
        .addToBooks(new Book(title:"The Stand"))
        .addToBooks(new Book(title:"The Shining"))
        .save()

However this will only save the Book and not the authors!

new Book(name:"Groovy in Action")
        .addToAuthors(new Author(name:"Dierk Koenig"))
        .addToAuthors(new Author(name:"Guillaume Laforge"))
        .save()

This is the expected behaviour as, just like Hibernate, only one side of a many-to-many can take responsibility for managing the relationship.

Grails' Scaffolding feature does not currently support many-to-many relationship and hence you must write the code to manage the relationship yourself

6.2.1.4 Basic Collection Types

class Person {
    static hasMany = [nicknames: String]
}

GORM will map an association like the above using a join table. You can alter various aspects of how the join table is mapped using the joinTable argument:

class Person {
    static hasMany = [nicknames: String]
    static mapping = {
       hasMany joinTable: [name: 'bunch_o_nicknames',
                           key: 'person_id',
                           column: 'nickname',
                           type: "text"]
    }
}

The example above will map to a table that looks like the following:

bunch_o_nicknames Table

---------------------------------------------
| person_id         |     nickname          |
---------------------------------------------
|   1               |      Fred             |
---------------------------------------------

6.2.2 Composition in GORM

class Person {
    Address homeAddress
    Address workAddress
    static embedded = ['homeAddress', 'workAddress']
}
class Address {
    String number
    String code
}

The resulting mapping would looking like this:

If you define the Address class in a separate Groovy file in the grails-app/domain directory you will also get an address table. If you don't want this to happen use Groovy's ability to define multiple classes per file and include the Address class below the Person class in the grails-app/domain/Person.groovy file

6.2.3 Inheritance in GORM

class Content {
     String author
}

class BlogEntry extends Content {
    URL url
}

class Book extends Content {
    String ISBN
}

class PodCast extends Content {
    byte[] audioStream
}

In the above example we have a parent Content class and then various child classes with more specific behaviour.

Considerations

At the database level Grails by default uses table-per-hierarchy mapping with a discriminator column called class so the parent class (Content) and its subclasses (BlogEntry, Book etc.), share the same table.

Table-per-hierarchy mapping has a down side in that you cannot have non-nullable properties with inheritance mapping. An alternative is to use table-per-subclass which can be enabled with the ORM DSL

However, excessive use of inheritance and table-per-subclass can result in poor query performance due to the use of outer join queries. In general our advice is if you're going to use inheritance, don't abuse it and don't make your inheritance hierarchy too deep.

Polymorphic Queries

The upshot of inheritance is that you get the ability to polymorphically query. For example using the list method on the Content super class will return all subclasses of Content:

def content = Content.list() // list all blog entries, books and podcasts
content = Content.findAllByAuthor('Joe Bloggs') // find all by author
def podCasts = PodCast.list() // list only podcasts

6.2.4 Sets, Lists and Maps

Sets of Objects

By default when you define a relationship with GORM it is a java.util.Set which is an unordered collection that cannot contain duplicates. In other words when you have:

class Author {
    static hasMany = [books: Book]
}

The books property that GORM injects is a java.util.Set. Sets guarantee uniqueness but not order, which may not be what you want. To have custom ordering you configure the Set as a SortedSet:

class Author {
    SortedSet books
    static hasMany = [books: Book]
}

In this case a java.util.SortedSet implementation is used which means you must implement java.lang.Comparable in your Book class:

class Book implements Comparable {
    String title
    Date releaseDate = new Date()
    int compareTo(obj) {
        releaseDate.compareTo(obj.releaseDate)
    }
}

The result of the above class is that the Book instances in the books collection of the Author class will be ordered by their release date.

Lists of Objects

To keep objects in the order which they were added and to be able to reference them by index like an array you can define your collection type as a List:

class Author {
    List books
    static hasMany = [books: Book]
}

In this case when you add new elements to the books collection the order is retained in a sequential list indexed from 0 so you can do:

author.books[0] // get the first book

The way this works at the database level is Hibernate creates a books_idx column where it saves the index of the elements in the collection to retain this order at the database level.

When using a List, elements must be added to the collection before being saved, otherwise Hibernate will throw an exception (org.hibernate.HibernateException: null index column for collection):

// This won't work!
def book = new Book(title: 'The Shining')
book.save()
author.addToBooks(book)
// Do it this way instead.
def book = new Book(title: 'Misery')
author.addToBooks(book)
author.save()

Bags of Objects

If ordering and uniqueness aren't a concern (or if you manage these explicitly) then you can use the Hibernate Bag type to represent mapped collections.

The only change required for this is to define the collection type as a Collection:

class Author {
   Collection books
   static hasMany = [books: Book]
}

Since uniqueness and order aren't managed by Hibernate, adding to or removing from collections mapped as a Bag don't trigger a load of all existing instances from the database, so this approach will perform better and require less memory than using a Set or a List.

Maps of Objects

If you want a simple map of string/value pairs GORM can map this with the following:

class Author {
    Map books // map of ISBN:book names
}
def a = new Author()
a.books = ["1590597583":"Grails Book"]
a.save()

If you want a Map of objects then you can do this:

class Book {
    Map authors
    static hasMany = [authors: Author]
}
def a = new Author(name:"Stephen King")
def book = new Book()
book.authors = [stephen:a]
book.save()

The static hasMany property defines the type of the elements within the Map. The keys for the map must be strings.

A Note on Collection Types and Performance

The Java Set type doesn't allow duplicates. To ensure uniqueness when adding an entry to a Set association Hibernate has to load the entire associations from the database. If you have a large numbers of entries in the association this can be costly in terms of performance.

The same behavior is required for List types, since Hibernate needs to load the entire association to maintain order. Therefore it is recommended that if you anticipate a large numbers of records in the association that you make the association bidirectional so that the link can be created on the inverse side. For example consider the following code:

def book = new Book(title:"New Grails Book")
def author = Author.get(1)
book.author = author
book.save()

In this example the association link is being created by the child (Book) and hence it is not necessary to manipulate the collection directly resulting in fewer queries and more efficient code. Given an Author with a large number of associated Book instances if you were to write code like the following you would see an impact on performance:

def book = new Book(title:"New Grails Book")
def author = Author.get(1)
author.addToBooks(book)
author.save()

You could also model the collection as a Hibernate Bag as described above.

6.3 Persistence Basics

Grails automatically binds a Hibernate session to the currently executing request. This lets you use the save and delete methods as well as other GORM methods transparently.

Transactional Write-Behind

A useful feature of Hibernate over direct JDBC calls and even other frameworks is that when you call save or delete it does not necessarily perform any SQL operations at that point. Hibernate batches up SQL statements and executes them as late as possible, often at the end of the request when flushing and closing the session. This is typically done for you automatically by Grails, which manages your Hibernate session.

Hibernate caches database updates where possible, only actually pushing the changes when it knows that a flush is required, or when a flush is triggered programmatically. One common case where Hibernate will flush cached updates is when performing queries since the cached information might be included in the query results. But as long as you're doing non-conflicting saves, updates, and deletes, they'll be batched until the session is flushed. This can be a significant performance boost for applications that do a lot of database writes.

Note that flushing is not the same as committing a transaction. If your actions are performed in the context of a transaction, flushing will execute SQL updates but the database will save the changes in its transaction queue and only finalize the updates when the transaction commits.

6.3.1 Saving and Updating

def p = Person.get(1)
p.save()

This save will be not be pushed to the database immediately - it will be pushed when the next flush occurs. But there are occasions when you want to control when those statements are executed or, in Hibernate terminology, when the session is "flushed". To do so you can use the flush argument to the save method:

def p = Person.get(1)
p.save(flush: true)

Note that in this case all pending SQL statements including previous saves, deletes, etc. will be synchronized with the database. This also lets you catch any exceptions, which is typically useful in highly concurrent scenarios involving optimistic locking:

def p = Person.get(1)
try {
    p.save(flush: true)
}
catch (org.springframework.dao.DataIntegrityViolationException e) {
    // deal with exception
}

Another thing to bear in mind is that Grails validates a domain instance every time you save it. If that validation fails the domain instance will not be persisted to the database. By default, save() will simply return null in this case, but if you would prefer it to throw an exception you can use the failOnError argument:

def p = Person.get(1)
try {
    p.save(failOnError: true)
}
catch (ValidationException e) {
    // deal with exception
}

You can even change the default behaviour with a setting in Config.groovy, as described in the section on configuration. Just remember that when you are saving domain instances that have been bound with data provided by the user, the likelihood of validation exceptions is quite high and you won't want those exceptions propagating to the end user.

You can find out more about the subtleties of saving data in this article - a must read!

6.3.2 Deleting Objects

def p = Person.get(1)
p.delete()

As with saves, Hibernate will use transactional write-behind to perform the delete; to perform the delete in-place you can use the flush argument:

def p = Person.get(1)
p.delete(flush: true)

Using the flush argument lets you catch any errors that occur during a delete. A common error that may occur is if you violate a database constraint, although this is normally down to a programming or schema error. The following example shows how to catch a DataIntegrityViolationException that is thrown when you violate the database constraints:

def p = Person.get(1)
try {
    p.delete(flush: true)
}
catch (org.springframework.dao.DataIntegrityViolationException e) {
    flash.message = "Could not delete person ${p.name}"
    redirect(action: "show", id: p.id)
}

Note that Grails does not supply a deleteAll method as deleting data is discouraged and can often be avoided through boolean flags/logic.

If you really need to batch delete data you can use the executeUpdate method to do batch DML statements:

Customer.executeUpdate("delete Customer c where c.name = :oldName",
                       [oldName: "Fred"])

6.3.3 Understanding Cascading Updates and Deletes

Whether it is a one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many, defining belongsTo will result in updates cascading from the owning class to its dependant (the other side of the relationship), and for many-/one-to-one and one-to-many relationships deletes will also cascade.

If you do not define belongsTo then no cascades will happen and you will have to manually save each object (except in the case of the one-to-many, in which case saves will cascade automatically if a new instance is in a hasMany collection).

Here is an example:

class Airport {
    String name
    static hasMany = [flights: Flight]
}

class Flight {
    String number
    static belongsTo = [airport: Airport]
}

If I now create an Airport and add some Flights to it I can save the Airport and have the updates cascaded down to each flight, hence saving the whole object graph:

new Airport(name: "Gatwick")
        .addToFlights(new Flight(number: "BA3430"))
        .addToFlights(new Flight(number: "EZ0938"))
        .save()

Conversely if I later delete the Airport all Flights associated with it will also be deleted:

def airport = Airport.findByName("Gatwick")
airport.delete()

However, if I were to remove belongsTo then the above cascading deletion code would not work. To understand this better take a look at the summaries below that describe the default behaviour of GORM with regards to specific associations. Also read part 2 of the GORM Gotchas series of articles to get a deeper understanding of relationships and cascading.

Bidirectional one-to-many with belongsTo

class A { static hasMany = [bees: B] }

class B { static belongsTo = [a: A] }

In the case of a bidirectional one-to-many where the many side defines a belongsTo then the cascade strategy is set to "ALL" for the one side and "NONE" for the many side.

Unidirectional one-to-many

class A { static hasMany = [bees: B] }

class B {  }

In the case of a unidirectional one-to-many where the many side defines no belongsTo then the cascade strategy is set to "SAVE-UPDATE".

Bidirectional one-to-many, no belongsTo

class A { static hasMany = [bees: B] }

class B { A a }

In the case of a bidirectional one-to-many where the many side does not define a belongsTo then the cascade strategy is set to "SAVE-UPDATE" for the one side and "NONE" for the many side.

Unidirectional one-to-one with belongsTo

class A {  }

class B { static belongsTo = [a: A] }

In the case of a unidirectional one-to-one association that defines a belongsTo then the cascade strategy is set to "ALL" for the owning side of the relationship (A->B) and "NONE" from the side that defines the belongsTo (B->A)

Note that if you need further control over cascading behaviour, you can use the ORM DSL.

6.3.4 Eager and Lazy Fetching

class Airport {
    String name
    static hasMany = [flights: Flight]
}

class Flight {
    String number
    Location destination
    static belongsTo = [airport: Airport]
}

class Location {
    String city
    String country
}

Given the above domain classes and the following code:

def airport = Airport.findByName("Gatwick")
for (flight in airport.flights) {
    println flight.destination.city
}

GORM will execute a single SQL query to fetch the Airport instance, another to get its flights, and then 1 extra query for each iteration over the flights association to get the current flight's destination. In other words you get N+1 queries (if you exclude the original one to get the airport).

Configuring Eager Fetching

An alternative approach that avoids the N+1 queries is to use eager fetching, which can be specified as follows:

class Airport {
    String name
    static hasMany = [flights: Flight]
    static mapping = {
        flights lazy: false
    }
}

In this case the flights association will be loaded at the same time as its Airport instance, although a second query will be executed to fetch the collection. You can also use fetch: 'join' instead of lazy: false , in which case GORM will only execute a single query to get the airports and their flights. This works well for single-ended associations, but you need to be careful with one-to-manys. Queries will work as you'd expect right up to the moment you add a limit to the number of results you want. At that point, you will likely end up with fewer results than you were expecting. The reason for this is quite technical but ultimately the problem arises from GORM using a left outer join.

So, the recommendation is currently to use fetch: 'join' for single-ended associations and lazy: false for one-to-manys.

Be careful how and where you use eager loading because you could load your entire database into memory with too many eager associations. You can find more information on the mapping options in the section on the ORM DSL.

Using Batch Fetching

Although eager fetching is appropriate for some cases, it is not always desirable. If you made everything eager you could quite possibly load your entire database into memory resulting in performance and memory problems. An alternative to eager fetching is to use batch fetching. You can configure Hibernate to lazily fetch results in "batches". For example:

class Airport {
    String name
    static hasMany = [flights: Flight]
    static mapping = {
        flights batchSize: 10
    }
}

In this case, due to the batchSize argument, when you iterate over the flights association, Hibernate will fetch results in batches of 10. For example if you had an Airport that had 30 flights, if you didn't configure batch fetching you would get 1 query to fetch the Airport and then 30 queries to fetch each flight. With batch fetching you get 1 query to fetch the Airport and 3 queries to fetch each Flight in batches of 10. In other words, batch fetching is an optimization of the lazy fetching strategy. Batch fetching can also be configured at the class level as follows:

class Flight {
    …
    static mapping = {
        batchSize 10
    }
}

Check out part 3 of the GORM Gotchas series for more in-depth coverage of this tricky topic.

6.3.5 Pessimistic and Optimistic Locking

Optimistic Locking

By default GORM classes are configured for optimistic locking. Optimistic locking is a feature of Hibernate which involves storing a version value in a special version column in the database that is incremented after each update.

The version column gets read into a version property that contains the current versioned state of persistent instance which you can access:

def airport = Airport.get(10)
println airport.version

When you perform updates Hibernate will automatically check the version property against the version column in the database and if they differ will throw a StaleObjectException. This will roll back the transaction if one is active.

This is useful as it allows a certain level of atomicity without resorting to pessimistic locking that has an inherit performance penalty. The downside is that you have to deal with this exception if you have highly concurrent writes. This requires flushing the session:

def airport = Airport.get(10)
try {
    airport.name = "Heathrow"
    airport.save(flush: true)
}
catch (org.springframework.dao.OptimisticLockingFailureException e) {
    // deal with exception
}

The way you deal with the exception depends on the application. You could attempt a programmatic merge of the data or go back to the user and ask them to resolve the conflict.

Alternatively, if it becomes a problem you can resort to pessimistic locking.

The version will only be updated after flushing the session.

Pessimistic Locking

Pessimistic locking is equivalent to doing a SQL "SELECT * FOR UPDATE" statement and locking a row in the database. This has the implication that other read operations will be blocking until the lock is released.

In Grails pessimistic locking is performed on an existing instance with the lock method:

def airport = Airport.get(10)
airport.lock() // lock for update
airport.name = "Heathrow"
airport.save()

Grails will automatically deal with releasing the lock for you once the transaction has been committed. However, in the above case what we are doing is "upgrading" from a regular SELECT to a SELECT..FOR UPDATE and another thread could still have updated the record in between the call to get() and the call to lock().

To get around this problem you can use the static lock method that takes an id just like get:

def airport = Airport.lock(10) // lock for update
airport.name = "Heathrow"
airport.save()

In this case only SELECT..FOR UPDATE is issued.

As well as the lock method you can also obtain a pessimistic locking using queries. For example using a dynamic finder:

def airport = Airport.findByName("Heathrow", [lock: true])

Or using criteria:

def airport = Airport.createCriteria().get {
    eq('name', 'Heathrow')
    lock true
}

6.3.6 Modification Checking

isDirty

You can use the isDirty method to check if any field has been modified:

def airport = Airport.get(10)
assert !airport.isDirty()
airport.properties = params
if (airport.isDirty()) {
   // do something based on changed state
}

isDirty() does not currently check collection associations, but it does check all other persistent properties and associations.

You can also check if individual fields have been modified:

def airport = Airport.get(10)
assert !airport.isDirty()
airport.properties = params
if (airport.isDirty('name')) {
   // do something based on changed name
}

getDirtyPropertyNames

You can use the getDirtyPropertyNames method to retrieve the names of modified fields; this may be empty but will not be null:

def airport = Airport.get(10)
assert !airport.isDirty()
airport.properties = params
def modifiedFieldNames = airport.getDirtyPropertyNames()
for (fieldName in modifiedFieldNames) {
   // do something based on changed value
}

getPersistentValue

You can use the getPersistentValue method to retrieve the value of a modified field:

def airport = Airport.get(10)
assert !airport.isDirty()
airport.properties = params
def modifiedFieldNames = airport.getDirtyPropertyNames()
for (fieldName in modifiedFieldNames) {
    def currentValue = airport."$fieldName"
    def originalValue = airport.getPersistentValue(fieldName)
    if (currentValue != originalValue) {
        // do something based on changed value
    }
}

6.4 Querying with GORM

• Dynamic Finders
• Where Queries
• Criteria Queries
• Hibernate Query Language (HQL)

In addition, Groovy's ability to manipulate collections with GPath and methods like sort, findAll and so on combined with GORM results in a powerful combination.

However, let's start with the basics.

Listing instances

Use the list method to obtain all instances of a given class:

def books = Book.list()

The list method supports arguments to perform pagination:

def books = Book.list(offset:10, max:20)

as well as sorting:

def books = Book.list(sort:"title", order:"asc")

Here, the sort argument is the name of the domain class property that you wish to sort on, and the order argument is either asc for ascending or desc for descending.

Retrieval by Database Identifier

The second basic form of retrieval is by database identifier using the get method:

def book = Book.get(23)

You can also obtain a list of instances for a set of identifiers using getAll:

def books = Book.getAll(23, 93, 81)

6.4.1 Dynamic Finders

Instead, a method is auto-magically generated using code synthesis at runtime, based on the properties of a given class. Take for example the Book class:

class Book {
    String title
    Date releaseDate
    Author author
}

class Author {
    String name
}

The Book class has properties such as title, releaseDate and author. These can be used by the findBy and findAllBy methods in the form of "method expressions":

def book = Book.findByTitle("The Stand")
book = Book.findByTitleLike("Harry Pot%")
book = Book.findByReleaseDateBetween(firstDate, secondDate)
book = Book.findByReleaseDateGreaterThan(someDate)
book = Book.findByTitleLikeOrReleaseDateLessThan("%Something%", someDate)

Method Expressions

A method expression in GORM is made up of the prefix such as findBy followed by an expression that combines one or more properties. The basic form is:

Book.findBy([Property][Comparator][Boolean Operator])?[Property][Comparator]

The tokens marked with a '?' are optional. Each comparator changes the nature of the query. For example:

def book = Book.findByTitle("The Stand")
book =  Book.findByTitleLike("Harry Pot%")

In the above example the first query is equivalent to equality whilst the latter, due to the Like comparator, is equivalent to a SQL like expression.

The possible comparators include:

• InList - In the list of given values
• LessThan - less than a given value
• LessThanEquals - less than or equal a give value
• GreaterThan - greater than a given value
• GreaterThanEquals - greater than or equal a given value
• Like - Equivalent to a SQL like expression
• Ilike - Similar to a Like, except case insensitive
• NotEqual - Negates equality
• InRange - Between the from and to values of a Groovy Range
• Rlike - Performs a Regexp LIKE in MySQL or Oracle otherwise falls back to Like
• Between - Between two values (requires two arguments)
• IsNotNull - Not a null value (doesn't take an argument)
• IsNull - Is a null value (doesn't take an argument)

Notice that the last three require different numbers of method arguments compared to the rest, as demonstrated in the following example:

def now = new Date()
def lastWeek = now - 7
def book = Book.findByReleaseDateBetween(lastWeek, now)
books = Book.findAllByReleaseDateIsNull()
books = Book.findAllByReleaseDateIsNotNull()

Boolean logic (AND/OR)

Method expressions can also use a boolean operator to combine two or more criteria:

def books = Book.findAllByTitleLikeAndReleaseDateGreaterThan(
                      "%Java%", new Date() - 30)

In this case we're using And in the middle of the query to make sure both conditions are satisfied, but you could equally use Or:

def books = Book.findAllByTitleLikeOrReleaseDateGreaterThan(
                      "%Java%", new Date() - 30)

You can combine as many criteria as you like, but they must all be combined with And or all Or. If you need to combine And and Or or if the number of criteria creates a very long method name, just convert the query to a Criteria or HQL query.

Querying Associations

Associations can also be used within queries:

def author = Author.findByName("Stephen King")
def books = author ? Book.findAllByAuthor(author) : []

In this case if the Author instance is not null we use it in a query to obtain all the Book instances for the given Author.

Pagination and Sorting

The same pagination and sorting parameters available on the list method can also be used with dynamic finders by supplying a map as the final parameter:

def books = Book.findAllByTitleLike("Harry Pot%",
               [max: 3, offset: 2, sort: "title", order: "desc"])

6.4.2 Where Queries

Basic Querying

The where method accepts a closure that looks very similar to Groovy's regular collection methods. The closure should define the logical criteria in regular Groovy syntax, for example:

def query = Person.where {
   firstName == "Bart"
}
Person bart = query.find()

The returned object is a DetachedCriteria instance, which means it is not associated with any particular database connection or session. This means you can use the where method to define common queries at the class level:

class Person {
    static simpsons = where {
         lastName == "Simpson"
    }
    …
}
…
Person.simpsons.each {
    println it.firstname
}

Query execution is lazy and only happens upon usage of the DetachedCriteria instance. If you want to execute a where-style query immediately there are variations of the findAll and find methods to accomplish this:

def results = Person.findAll {
     lastName == "Simpson"
}
def results = Person.findAll(sort:"firstName") {
     lastName == "Simpson"
}
Person p = Person.find { firstName == "Bart" }

Each Groovy operator maps onto a regular criteria method. The following table provides a map of Groovy operators to methods:

It is possible use regular Groovy comparison operators and logic to formulate complex queries:

def query = Person.where {
    (lastName != "Simpson" && firstName != "Fred") || (firstName == "Bart" && age > 9)
}
def results = query.list(sort:"firstName")

The Groovy regex matching operators map onto like and ilike queries unless the expression on the right hand side is a Pattern object, in which case they map onto an rlike query:

def query = Person.where {
     firstName ==~ ~/B.+/
}

Note that rlike queries are only supported if the underlying database supports regular expressions

A between criteria query can be done by combining the in keyword with a range:

def query = Person.where {
     age in 18..65
}

Finally, you can do isNull and isNotNull style queries by using null with regular comparison operators:

def query = Person.where {
     middleName == null
}

Query Composition

Since the return value of the where method is a DetachedCriteria instance you can compose new queries from the original query:

def query = Person.where {
     lastName == "Simpson"
}
def bartQuery = query.where {
     firstName == "Bart"
}
Person p = bartQuery.find()

Note that you cannot pass a closure defined as a variable into the where method unless it has been explicitly cast to a DetachedCriteria instance. In other words the following will produce an error:

def callable = {
    lastName == "Simpson"
}
def query = Person.where(callable)

The above must be written as follows:

import grails.gorm.DetachedCriteria
def callable = {
    lastName == "Simpson"
} as DetachedCriteria<Person>
def query = Person.where(callable)

As you can see the closure definition is cast (using the Groovy as keyword) to a DetachedCriteria instance targeted at the Person class.

Conjunction, Disjunction and Negation

As mentioned previously you can combine regular Groovy logical operators (|| and &&) to form conjunctions and disjunctions:

def query = Person.where {
    (lastName != "Simpson" && firstName != "Fred") || (firstName == "Bart" && age > 9)
}

You can also negate a logical comparison using !:

def query = Person.where {
    firstName == "Fred" && !(lastName == 'Simpson')
}

Property Comparison Queries

If you use a property name on both the left hand and right side of a comparison expression then the appropriate property comparison criteria is automatically used:

def query = Person.where {
   firstName == lastName
}

The following table described how each comparison operator maps onto each criteria property comparison method:

Querying Associations

Associations can be queried by using the dot operator to specify the property name of the association to be queried:

def query = Pet.where {
    owner.firstName == "Joe" || owner.firstName == "Fred"
}

You can group multiple criterion inside a closure method call where the name of the method matches the association name:

def query = Person.where {
    pets { name == "Jack" || name == "Joe" }
}

This technique can be combined with other top-level criteria:

def query = Person.where {
     pets { name == "Jack" } || firstName == "Ed"
}

For collection associations it is possible to apply queries to the size of the collection:

def query = Person.where {
       pets.size() == 2
}

The following table shows which operator maps onto which criteria method for each size() comparison:

Subqueries

It is possible to execute subqueries within where queries. For example to find all the people older than the average age the following query can be used:

final query = Person.where {
  age > avg(age)
}

The following table lists the possible subqueries:

You can apply additional criteria to any subquery by using the of method and passing in a closure containing the criteria:

def query = Person.where {
  age > avg(age).of { lastName == "Simpson" } && firstName == "Homer"
}

Since the property subquery returns multiple results, the criterion used compares all results. For example the following query will find all people younger than people with the surname "Simpson":

Person.where {
    age < property(age).of { lastName == "Simpson" }
}

Other Functions

There are several functions available to you within the context of a query. These are summarized in the table below:

Currently functions can only be applied to properties or associations of domain classes. You cannot, for example, use a function on a result of a subquery.

For example the following query can be used to find all pet's born in 2011:

def query = Pet.where {
    year(birthDate) == 2011
}

You can also apply functions to associations:

def query = Person.where {
    year(pets.birthDate) == 2009
}

Batch Updates and Deletes

Since each where method call returns a DetachedCriteria instance, you can use where queries to execute batch operations such as batch updates and deletes. For example, the following query will update all people with the surname "Simpson" to have the surname "Bloggs":

def query = Person.where {
    lastName == 'Simpson'
}
int total = query.updateAll(lastName:"Bloggs")

Note that one limitation with regards to batch operations is that join queries (queries that query associations) are not allowed.

To batch delete records you can use the deleteAll method:

def query = Person.where {
    lastName == 'Simpson'
}
int total = query.deleteAll()

6.4.3 Criteria

Criteria can be used either with the createCriteria or withCriteria methods. The builder uses Hibernate's Criteria API. The nodes on this builder map the static methods found in the Restrictions class of the Hibernate Criteria API. For example:

def c = Account.createCriteria()
def results = c {
    between("balance", 500, 1000)
    eq("branch", "London")
    or {
        like("holderFirstName", "Fred%")
        like("holderFirstName", "Barney%")
    }
    maxResults(10)
    order("holderLastName", "desc")
}

This criteria will select up to 10 Account objects in a List matching the following criteria:

• balance is between 500 and 1000
• branch is 'London'
• holderFirstName starts with 'Fred' or 'Barney'

The results will be sorted in descending order by holderLastName.

If no records are found with the above criteria, an empty List is returned.

Conjunctions and Disjunctions

As demonstrated in the previous example you can group criteria in a logical OR using an or { } block:

or {
    between("balance", 500, 1000)
    eq("branch", "London")
}

This also works with logical AND:

and {
    between("balance", 500, 1000)
    eq("branch", "London")
}

And you can also negate using logical NOT:

not {
    between("balance", 500, 1000)
    eq("branch", "London")
}

All top level conditions are implied to be AND'd together.

Querying Associations

Associations can be queried by having a node that matches the property name. For example say the Account class had many Transaction objects:

class Account {
    …
    static hasMany = [transactions: Transaction]
    …
}

We can query this association by using the property name transactions as a builder node:

def c = Account.createCriteria()
def now = new Date()
def results = c.list {
    transactions {
        between('date', now - 10, now)
    }
}

The above code will find all the Account instances that have performed transactions within the last 10 days. You can also nest such association queries within logical blocks:

def c = Account.createCriteria()
def now = new Date()
def results = c.list {
    or {
        between('created', now - 10, now)
        transactions {
            between('date', now - 10, now)
        }
    }
}

Here we find all accounts that have either performed transactions in the last 10 days OR have been recently created in the last 10 days.

Querying with Projections

Projections may be used to customise the results. Define a "projections" node within the criteria builder tree to use projections. There are equivalent methods within the projections node to the methods found in the Hibernate Projections class:

def c = Account.createCriteria()
def numberOfBranches = c.get {
    projections {
        countDistinct('branch')
    }
}

When multiple fields are specified in the projection, a List of values will be returned. A single value will be returned otherwise.

SQL Projections

The criteria DSL provides access to Hibernate's SQL projection API.

// Box is a domain class…
class Box {
    int width
    int height
}

// Use SQL projections to retrieve the perimeter and area of all of the Box instances…
def c = Box.createCriteria()
def results = c.list {
    projections {
      sqlProjection '(2 * (width + height)) as perimeter, (width * height) as area', ['perimeter', 'area'], [INTEGER, INTEGER]
    }
}

The first argument to the sqlProjection method is the SQL which defines the projections. The second argument is a list of Strings which represent column aliases corresponding to the projected values expressed in the SQL. The third argument is a list of org.hibernate.type.Type instances which correspond to the projected values expressed in the SQL. The API supports all org.hibernate.type.Type objects but constants like INTEGER, LONG, FLOAT etc. are provided by the DSL which correspond to all of the types defined in org.hibernate.type.StandardBasicTypes.

Consider that the following table represents the data in the BOX table.

The query above would return results like this:

[[18, 14], [20, 16], [22, 18], [26, 36]]

Each of the inner lists contains the 2 projected values for each Box, perimeter and area.

Note that if there are other references in scope wherever your criteria query is expressed that have names that conflict with any of the type constants described above, the code in your criteria will refer to those references, not the type constants provided by the DSL. In the unlikely event of that happening you can disambiguate the conflict by referring to the fully qualified Hibernate type. For example StandardBasicTypes.INTEGER instead of INTEGER.

If only 1 value is being projected, the alias and the type do not need to be included in a list.

def results = c.list {
    projections {
      sqlProjection 'sum(width * height) as totalArea', 'totalArea', INTEGER
    }
}

That query would return a single result with the value of 84 as the total area of all of the Box instances.

The DSL supports grouped projections with the sqlGroupProjection method.

def results = c.list {
    projections {
        sqlGroupProjection 'width, sum(height) as combinedHeightsForThisWidth', 'width', ['width', 'combinedHeightsForThisWidth'], [INTEGER, INTEGER]
    }
}

The first argument to the sqlGroupProjection method is the SQL which defines the projections. The second argument represents the group by clause that should be part of the query. That string may be single column name or a comma separated list of column names. The third argument is a list of Strings which represent column aliases corresponding to the projected values expressed in the SQL. The fourth argument is a list of org.hibernate.type.Type instances which correspond to the projected values expressed in the SQL.

The query above is projecting the combined heights of boxes grouped by width and would return results that look like this:

[[2, 24], [4, 9]]

Each of the inner lists contains 2 values. The first value is a box width and the second value is the sum of the heights of all of the boxes which have that width.

Using SQL Restrictions

You can access Hibernate's SQL Restrictions capabilities.

def c = Person.createCriteria()
def peopleWithShortFirstNames = c.list {
    sqlRestriction "char_length(first_name) <= 4"
}

SQL Restrictions may be parameterized to deal with SQL injection vulnerabilities related to dynamic restrictions.

def c = Person.createCriteria()
def peopleWithShortFirstNames = c.list {
    sqlRestriction "char_length(first_name) < ? AND char_length(first_name) > ?", [maxValue, minValue]
}

Note that the parameter there is SQL. The first_name attribute referenced in the example refers to the persistence model, not the object model like in HQL queries. The Person property named firstName is mapped to the first_name column in the database and you must refer to that in the sqlRestriction string.

Also note that the SQL used here is not necessarily portable across databases.

Using Scrollable Results

You can use Hibernate's ScrollableResults feature by calling the scroll method:

def results = crit.scroll {
    maxResults(10)
}
def f = results.first()
def l = results.last()
def n = results.next()
def p = results.previous()
def future = results.scroll(10)
def accountNumber = results.getLong('number')

To quote the documentation of Hibernate ScrollableResults:

A result iterator that allows moving around within the results by arbitrary increments. The Query / ScrollableResults pattern is very similar to the JDBC PreparedStatement / ResultSet pattern and the semantics of methods of this interface are similar to the similarly named methods on ResultSet.

Contrary to JDBC, columns of results are numbered from zero.

Setting properties in the Criteria instance

If a node within the builder tree doesn't match a particular criterion it will attempt to set a property on the Criteria object itself. This allows full access to all the properties in this class. This example calls setMaxResults and setFirstResult on the Criteria instance:

import org.hibernate.FetchMode as FM
…
def results = c.list {
    maxResults(10)
    firstResult(50)
    fetchMode("aRelationship", FM.JOIN)
}

Querying with Eager Fetching

In the section on Eager and Lazy Fetching we discussed how to declaratively specify fetching to avoid the N+1 SELECT problem. However, this can also be achieved using a criteria query:

def criteria = Task.createCriteria()
def tasks = criteria.list{
    eq "assignee.id", task.assignee.id
    join 'assignee'
    join 'project'
    order 'priority', 'asc'
}

Notice the usage of the join method: it tells the criteria API to use a JOIN to fetch the named associations with the Task instances. It's probably best not to use this for one-to-many associations though, because you will most likely end up with duplicate results. Instead, use the 'select' fetch mode:

import org.hibernate.FetchMode as FM
…
def results = Airport.withCriteria {
    eq "region", "EMEA"
    fetchMode "flights", FM.SELECT
}

fetchMode and join are general settings of the query and can only be specified at the top-level, i.e. you cannot use them inside projections or association constraints.

An important point to bear in mind is that if you include associations in the query constraints, those associations will automatically be eagerly loaded. For example, in this query:

def results = Airport.withCriteria {
    eq "region", "EMEA"
    flights {
        like "number", "BA%"
    }
}

Method Reference

If you invoke the builder with no method name such as:

c { … }

The build defaults to listing all the results and hence the above is equivalent to:

c.list { … }

Combining Criteria

You can combine multiple criteria closures in the following way:

def emeaCriteria = {
    eq "region", "EMEA"
}
def results = Airport.withCriteria {
    emeaCriteria.delegate = delegate
    emeaCriteria()
    flights {
        like "number", "BA%"
    }
}

This technique requires that each criteria must refer to the same domain class (i.e. Airport). A more flexible approach is to use Detached Criteria, as described in the following section.

6.4.4 Detached Criteria

Building Detached Criteria Queries

The primary point of entry for using the Detached Criteria is the grails.gorm.DetachedCriteria class which accepts a domain class as the only argument to its constructor:

import grails.gorm.*
…
def criteria = new DetachedCriteria(Person)

Once you have obtained a reference to a detached criteria instance you can execute where queries or criteria queries to build up the appropriate query. To build a normal criteria query you can use the build method:

def criteria = new DetachedCriteria(Person).build {
    eq 'lastName', 'Simpson'
}

Note that methods on the DetachedCriteria instance do not mutate the original object but instead return a new query. In other words, you have to use the return value of the build method to obtain the mutated criteria object:

def criteria = new DetachedCriteria(Person).build {
    eq 'lastName', 'Simpson'
}
def bartQuery = criteria.build {
    eq 'firstName', 'Bart'
}

Executing Detached Criteria Queries

Unlike regular criteria, Detached Criteria are lazy, in that no query is executed at the point of definition. Once a Detached Criteria query has been constructed then there are a number of useful query methods which are summarized in the table below:

As an example the following code will list the first 4 matching records sorted by the firstName property:

def criteria = new DetachedCriteria(Person).build {
    eq 'lastName', 'Simpson'
}
def results = criteria.list(max:4, sort:"firstName")

You can also supply additional criteria to the list method:

def results = criteria.list(max:4, sort:"firstName") {
    gt 'age', 30
}

To retrieve a single result you can use the get or find methods (which are synonyms):

Person p = criteria.find() // or criteria.get()

The DetachedCriteria class itself also implements the Iterable interface which means that it can be treated like a list:

def criteria = new DetachedCriteria(Person).build {
    eq 'lastName', 'Simpson'
}
criteria.each {
    println it.firstName
}

In this case the query is only executed when the each method is called. The same applies to all other Groovy collection iteration methods.

You can also execute dynamic finders on DetachedCriteria just like on domain classes. For example:

def criteria = new DetachedCriteria(Person).build {
    eq 'lastName', 'Simpson'
}
def bart = criteria.findByFirstName("Bart")

Using Detached Criteria for Subqueries

Within the context of a regular criteria query you can use DetachedCriteria to execute subquery. For example if you want to find all people who are older than the average age the following query will accomplish that:

def results = Person.withCriteria {
     gt "age", new DetachedCriteria(Person).build {
         projections {
             avg "age"
         }
     }
     order "firstName"
 }

Notice that in this case the subquery class is the same as the original criteria query class (i.e. Person) and hence the query can be shortened to:

def results = Person.withCriteria {
     gt "age", {
         projections {
             avg "age"
         }
     }
     order "firstName"
 }

If the subquery class differs from the original criteria query then you will have to use the original syntax.

In the previous example the projection ensured that only a single result was returned (the average age). If your subquery returns multiple results then there are different criteria methods that need to be used to compare the result. For example to find all the people older than the ages 18 to 65 a gtAll query can be used:

def results = Person.withCriteria {
    gtAll "age", {
        projections {
            property "age"
        }
        between 'age', 18, 65
    }
    order "firstName"
}

The following table summarizes criteria methods for operating on subqueries that return multiple results:

Batch Operations with Detached Criteria

The DetachedCriteria class can be used to execute batch operations such as batch updates and deletes. For example, the following query will update all people with the surname "Simpson" to have the surname "Bloggs":

def criteria = new DetachedCriteria(Person).build {
    eq 'lastName', 'Simpson'
}
int total = criteria.updateAll(lastName:"Bloggs")

Note that one limitation with regards to batch operations is that join queries (queries that query associations) are not allowed within the DetachedCriteria instance.

To batch delete records you can use the deleteAll method:

def criteria = new DetachedCriteria(Person).build {
    eq 'lastName', 'Simpson'
}
int total = criteria.deleteAll()

6.4.5 Hibernate Query Language (HQL)

GORM provides a number of methods that work with HQL including find, findAll and executeQuery. An example of a query can be seen below:

def results =
      Book.findAll("from Book as b where b.title like 'Lord of the%'")

Positional and Named Parameters

In this case the value passed to the query is hard coded, however you can equally use positional parameters:

def results =
      Book.findAll("from Book as b where b.title like ?", ["The Shi%"])

def author = Author.findByName("Stephen King")
def books = Book.findAll("from Book as book where book.author = ?",
                         [author])

Or even named parameters:

def results =
      Book.findAll("from Book as b " +
                   "where b.title like :search or b.author like :search",
                   [search: "The Shi%"])

def author = Author.findByName("Stephen King")
def books = Book.findAll("from Book as book where book.author = :author",
                         [author: author])

Multiline Queries

Use the line continuation character to separate the query across multiple lines:

def results = Book.findAll("\
from Book as b, \
     Author as a \
where b.author = a and a.surname = ?", ['Smith'])

Triple-quoted Groovy multiline Strings will NOT work with HQL queries.

Pagination and Sorting

You can also perform pagination and sorting whilst using HQL queries. To do so simply specify the pagination options as a Map at the end of the method call and include an "ORDER BY" clause in the HQL:

def results =
      Book.findAll("from Book as b where " +
                   "b.title like 'Lord of the%' " +
                   "order by b.title asc",
                   [max: 10, offset: 20])

6.5 Advanced GORM Features

6.5.1 Events and Auto Timestamping

• beforeInsert - Executed before an object is initially persisted to the database. If you return false, the insert will be cancelled.
• beforeUpdate - Executed before an object is updated. If you return false, the update will be cancelled.
• beforeDelete - Executed before an object is deleted. If you return false, the delete will be cancelled.
• beforeValidate - Executed before an object is validated
• afterInsert - Executed after an object is persisted to the database
• afterUpdate - Executed after an object has been updated
• afterDelete - Executed after an object has been deleted
• onLoad - Executed when an object is loaded from the database

To add an event simply register the relevant method with your domain class.

Do not attempt to flush the session within an event (such as with obj.save(flush:true)). Since events are fired during flushing this will cause a StackOverflowError.

Event types

The beforeInsert event

Fired before an object is saved to the database

class Person {
   private static final Date NULL_DATE = new Date(0)
   String firstName
   String lastName
   Date signupDate = NULL_DATE
   def beforeInsert() {
      if (signupDate == NULL_DATE) {
         signupDate = new Date()
      }
   }
}

The beforeUpdate event

Fired before an existing object is updated

class Person {
   def securityService
   String firstName
   String lastName
   String lastUpdatedBy
   static constraints = {
      lastUpdatedBy nullable: true
   }
   def beforeUpdate() {
      lastUpdatedBy = securityService.currentAuthenticatedUsername()
   }
}

The beforeDelete event

Fired before an object is deleted.

class Person {
   String name
   def beforeDelete() {
      ActivityTrace.withNewSession {
         new ActivityTrace(eventName: "Person Deleted", data: name).save()
      }
   }
}

Notice the usage of withNewSession method above. Since events are triggered whilst Hibernate is flushing using persistence methods like save() and delete() won't result in objects being saved unless you run your operations with a new Session.

Fortunately the withNewSession method lets you share the same transactional JDBC connection even though you're using a different underlying Session.

The beforeValidate event

Fired before an object is validated.

class Person {
   String name
   static constraints = {
       name size: 5..45
   }
   def beforeValidate() {
       name = name?.trim()
   }
}

The beforeValidate method is run before any validators are run.

Validation may run more often than you think. It is triggered by the validate() and save() methods as you'd expect, but it is also typically triggered just before the view is rendered as well. So when writing beforeValidate() implementations, make sure that they can handle being called multiple times with the same property values.

GORM supports an overloaded version of beforeValidate which accepts a List parameter which may include the names of the properties which are about to be validated. This version of beforeValidate will be called when the validate method has been invoked and passed a List of property names as an argument.

class Person {
   String name
   String town
   Integer age
   static constraints = {
       name size: 5..45
       age range: 4..99
   }
   def beforeValidate(List propertiesBeingValidated) {
      // do pre validation work based on propertiesBeingValidated
   }
}
def p = new Person(name: 'Jacob Brown', age: 10)
p.validate(['age', 'name'])

Note that when validate is triggered indirectly because of a call to the save method that the validate method is being invoked with no arguments, not a List that includes all of the property names.

Either or both versions of beforeValidate may be defined in a domain class. GORM will prefer the List version if a List is passed to validate but will fall back on the no-arg version if the List version does not exist. Likewise, GORM will prefer the no-arg version if no arguments are passed to validate but will fall back on the List version if the no-arg version does not exist. In that case, null is passed to beforeValidate.

The onLoad/beforeLoad event

Fired immediately before an object is loaded from the database:

class Person {
   String name
   Date dateCreated
   Date lastUpdated
   def onLoad() {
      log.debug "Loading ${id}"
   }
}

beforeLoad() is effectively a synonym for onLoad(), so only declare one or the other.

The afterLoad event

Fired immediately after an object is loaded from the database:

class Person {
   String name
   Date dateCreated
   Date lastUpdated
   def afterLoad() {
      name = "I'm loaded"
   }
}

Custom Event Listeners

As of Grails 2.0 there is a new API for plugins and applications to register and listen for persistence events. This API is not tied to Hibernate and also works for other persistence plugins such as the MongoDB plugin for GORM.

To use this API you need to subclass AbstractPersistenceEventListener (in package org.grails.datastore.mapping.engine.event ) and implement the methods onPersistenceEvent and supportsEventType. You also must provide a reference to the datastore to the listener. The simplest possible implementation can be seen below:

public MyPersistenceListener(final Datastore datastore) {
    super(datastore)
}
@Override
protected void onPersistenceEvent(final AbstractPersistenceEvent event) {
    switch(event.eventType) {
        case PreInsert:
            println "PRE INSERT ${event.entityObject}"
        break
        case PostInsert:
            println "POST INSERT ${event.entityObject}"
        break
        case PreUpdate:
            println "PRE UPDATE ${event.entityObject}"
        break;
        case PostUpdate:
            println "POST UPDATE ${event.entityObject}"
        break;
        case PreDelete:
            println "PRE DELETE ${event.entityObject}"
        break;
        case PostDelete:
            println "POST DELETE ${event.entityObject}"
        break;
        case PreLoad:
            println "PRE LOAD ${event.entityObject}"
        break;
        case PostLoad:
            println "POST LOAD ${event.entityObject}"
        break;
    }
}
@Override
public boolean supportsEventType(Class<? extends ApplicationEvent> eventType) {
    return true
}

The AbstractPersistenceEvent class has many subclasses (PreInsertEvent, PostInsertEvent etc.) that provide further information specific to the event. A cancel() method is also provided on the event which allows you to veto an insert, update or delete operation.

Once you have created your event listener you need to register it with the ApplicationContext. This can be done in BootStrap.groovy:

def init = {
    application.mainContext.eventTriggeringInterceptor.datastores.each { k, datastore ->
        applicationContext.addApplicationListener new MyPersistenceListener(datastore)
    }
}

or use this in a plugin:

def doWithApplicationContext = { applicationContext ->
    application.mainContext.eventTriggeringInterceptor.datastores.each { k, datastore ->
        applicationContext.addApplicationListener new MyPersistenceListener(datastore)
    }
}

Hibernate Events

It is generally encouraged to use the non-Hibernate specific API described above, but if you need access to more detailed Hibernate events then you can define custom Hibernate-specific event listeners.

You can also register event handler classes in an application's grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy or in the doWithSpring closure in a plugin descriptor by registering a Spring bean named hibernateEventListeners. This bean has one property, listenerMap which specifies the listeners to register for various Hibernate events.

The values of the Map are instances of classes that implement one or more Hibernate listener interfaces. You can use one class that implements all of the required interfaces, or one concrete class per interface, or any combination. The valid Map keys and corresponding interfaces are listed here:

For example, you could register a class AuditEventListener which implements PostInsertEventListener, PostUpdateEventListener, and PostDeleteEventListener using the following in an application:

beans = {
   auditListener(AuditEventListener)
   hibernateEventListeners(HibernateEventListeners) {
      listenerMap = ['post-insert': auditListener,
                     'post-update': auditListener,
                     'post-delete': auditListener]
   }
}

or use this in a plugin:

def doWithSpring = {
   auditListener(AuditEventListener)
   hibernateEventListeners(HibernateEventListeners) {
      listenerMap = ['post-insert': auditListener,
                     'post-update': auditListener,
                     'post-delete': auditListener]
   }
}

Automatic timestamping

If you define a dateCreated property it will be set to the current date for you when you create new instances. Likewise, if you define a lastUpdated property it will be automatically be updated for you when you change persistent instances.

If this is not the behaviour you want you can disable this feature with:

class Person {
   Date dateCreated
   Date lastUpdated
   static mapping = {
      autoTimestamp false
   }
}

If you have nullable: false constraints on either dateCreated or lastUpdated, your domain instances will fail validation - probably not what you want. Omit constraints from these properties unless you disable automatic timestamping.

6.5.2 Custom ORM Mapping

None of this is necessary if you are happy to stick to the conventions defined by GORM for table names, column names and so on. You only needs this functionality if you need to tailor the way GORM maps onto legacy schemas or configures caching

Custom mappings are defined using a static mapping block defined within your domain class:

class Person {
    …
    static mapping = {
        version false
        autoTimestamp false
    }
}

You can also configure global mappings in Config.groovy (or an external config file) using this setting:

grails.gorm.default.mapping = {
    version false
    autoTimestamp false
}

It has the same syntax as the standard mapping block but it applies to all your domain classes! You can then override these defaults within the mapping block of a domain class.

6.5.2.1 Table and Column Names

Table names

The database table name which the class maps to can be customized using the table method:

class Person {
    …
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
    }
}

In this case the class would be mapped to a table called people instead of the default name of person.

Column names

It is also possible to customize the mapping for individual columns onto the database. For example to change the name you can do:

class Person {
    String firstName
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
        firstName column: 'First_Name'
    }
}

Here firstName is a dynamic method within the mapping Closure that has a single Map parameter. Since its name corresponds to a domain class persistent field, the parameter values (in this case just "column") are used to configure the mapping for that property.

Column type

GORM supports configuration of Hibernate types with the DSL using the type attribute. This includes specifying user types that implement the Hibernate org.hibernate.usertype.UserType interface, which allows complete customization of how a type is persisted. As an example if you had a PostCodeType you could use it as follows:

class Address {
    String number
    String postCode
    static mapping = {
        postCode type: PostCodeType
    }
}

Alternatively if you just wanted to map it to one of Hibernate's basic types other than the default chosen by Grails you could use:

class Address {
    String number
    String postCode
    static mapping = {
        postCode type: 'text'
    }
}

This would make the postCode column map to the default large-text type for the database you're using (for example TEXT or CLOB).

See the Hibernate documentation regarding Basic Types for further information.

Many-to-One/One-to-One Mappings

In the case of associations it is also possible to configure the foreign keys used to map associations. In the case of a many-to-one or one-to-one association this is exactly the same as any regular column. For example consider the following:

class Person {
    String firstName
    Address address
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
        firstName column: 'First_Name'
        address column: 'Person_Address_Id'
    }
}

By default the address association would map to a foreign key column called address_id. By using the above mapping we have changed the name of the foreign key column to Person_Adress_Id.

One-to-Many Mapping

With a bidirectional one-to-many you can change the foreign key column used by changing the column name on the many side of the association as per the example in the previous section on one-to-one associations. However, with unidirectional associations the foreign key needs to be specified on the association itself. For example given a unidirectional one-to-many relationship between Person and Address the following code will change the foreign key in the address table:

class Person {
    String firstName
    static hasMany = [addresses: Address]
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
        firstName column: 'First_Name'
        addresses column: 'Person_Address_Id'
    }
}

If you don't want the column to be in the address table, but instead some intermediate join table you can use the joinTable parameter:

class Person {
    String firstName
    static hasMany = [addresses: Address]
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
        firstName column: 'First_Name'
        addresses joinTable: [name: 'Person_Addresses',
                              key: 'Person_Id',
                              column: 'Address_Id']
    }
}

Many-to-Many Mapping

Grails, by default maps a many-to-many association using a join table. For example consider this many-to-many association:

class Group {
    …
    static hasMany = [people: Person]
}

class Person {
    …
    static belongsTo = Group
    static hasMany = [groups: Group]
}

In this case Grails will create a join table called group_person containing foreign keys called person_id and group_id referencing the person and group tables. To change the column names you can specify a column within the mappings for each class.

class Group {
   …
   static mapping = {
       people column: 'Group_Person_Id'
   }
}
class Person {
   …
   static mapping = {
       groups column: 'Group_Group_Id'
   }
}

You can also specify the name of the join table to use:

class Group {
   …
   static mapping = {
       people column: 'Group_Person_Id',
              joinTable: 'PERSON_GROUP_ASSOCIATIONS'
   }
}
class Person {
   …
   static mapping = {
       groups column: 'Group_Group_Id',
              joinTable: 'PERSON_GROUP_ASSOCIATIONS'
   }
}

6.5.2.2 Caching Strategy

Setting up caching

Hibernate features a second-level cache with a customizable cache provider. This needs to be configured in the grails-app/conf/DataSource.groovy file as follows:

hibernate {
    cache.use_second_level_cache=true
    cache.use_query_cache=true
    cache.provider_class='org.hibernate.cache.EhCacheProvider'
}

You can customize any of these settings, for example to use a distributed caching mechanism.

For further reading on caching and in particular Hibernate's second-level cache, refer to the Hibernate documentation on the subject.

Caching instances

Call the cache method in your mapping block to enable caching with the default settings:

class Person {
    …
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
        cache true
    }
}

This will configure a 'read-write' cache that includes both lazy and non-lazy properties. You can customize this further:

class Person {
    …
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
        cache usage: 'read-only', include: 'non-lazy'
    }
}

Caching associations

As well as the ability to use Hibernate's second level cache to cache instances you can also cache collections (associations) of objects. For example:

class Person {
    String firstName
    static hasMany = [addresses: Address]
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
        version false
        addresses column: 'Address', cache: true
    }
}

class Address {
    String number
    String postCode
}

This will enable a 'read-write' caching mechanism on the addresses collection. You can also use:

cache: 'read-write' // or 'read-only' or 'transactional'

to further configure the cache usage.

Caching Queries

You can cache queries such as dynamic finders and criteria. To do so using a dynamic finder you can pass the cache argument:

def person = Person.findByFirstName("Fred", [cache: true])

In order for the results of the query to be cached, you must enable caching in your mapping as discussed in the previous section.

You can also cache criteria queries:

def people = Person.withCriteria {
    like('firstName', 'Fr%')
    cache true
}

Cache usages

Below is a description of the different cache settings and their usages:

• read-only - If your application needs to read but never modify instances of a persistent class, a read-only cache may be used.
• read-write - If the application needs to update data, a read-write cache might be appropriate.
• nonstrict-read-write - If the application only occasionally needs to update data (i.e. if it is very unlikely that two transactions would try to update the same item simultaneously) and strict transaction isolation is not required, a nonstrict-read-write cache might be appropriate.
• transactional - The transactional cache strategy provides support for fully transactional cache providers such as JBoss TreeCache. Such a cache may only be used in a JTA environment and you must specify hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class in the grails-app/conf/DataSource.groovy file's hibernate config.

6.5.2.3 Inheritance Strategies

class Payment {
    Integer amount
    static mapping = {
        tablePerHierarchy false
    }
}
class CreditCardPayment extends Payment {
    String cardNumber
}

The mapping of the root Payment class specifies that it will not be using table-per-hierarchy mapping for all child classes.

6.5.2.4 Custom Database Identity

To deal with this Hibernate defines the concept of an id generator. You can customize the id generator and the column it maps to as follows:

class Person {
    …
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
        version false
        id generator: 'hilo',
           params: [table: 'hi_value',
                    column: 'next_value',
                    max_lo: 100]
    }
}

In this case we're using one of Hibernate's built in 'hilo' generators that uses a separate table to generate ids.

For more information on the different Hibernate generators refer to the Hibernate reference documentation

Although you don't typically specify the id field (Grails adds it for you) you can still configure its mapping like the other properties. For example to customise the column for the id property you can do:

class Person {
    …
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
        version false
        id column: 'person_id'
    }
}

6.5.2.5 Composite Primary Keys

import org.apache.commons.lang.builder.HashCodeBuilder
class Person implements Serializable {
    String firstName
    String lastName
    boolean equals(other) {
        if (!(other instanceof Person)) {
            return false
        }
        other.firstName == firstName && other.lastName == lastName
    }
    int hashCode() {
        def builder = new HashCodeBuilder()
        builder.append firstName
        builder.append lastName
        builder.toHashCode()
    }
    static mapping = {
        id composite: ['firstName', 'lastName']
    }
}

The above will create a composite id of the firstName and lastName properties of the Person class. To retrieve an instance by id you use a prototype of the object itself:

def p = Person.get(new Person(firstName: "Fred", lastName: "Flintstone"))
println p.firstName

Domain classes mapped with composite primary keys must implement the Serializable interface and override the equals and hashCode methods, using the properties in the composite key for the calculations. The example above uses a HashCodeBuilder for convenience but it's fine to implement it yourself.

Another important consideration when using composite primary keys is associations. If for example you have a many-to-one association where the foreign keys are stored in the associated table then 2 columns will be present in the associated table.

For example consider the following domain class:

class Address {
    Person person
}

In this case the address table will have an additional two columns called person_first_name and person_last_name. If you wish the change the mapping of these columns then you can do so using the following technique:

class Address {
    Person person
    static mapping = {
        columns {
		    person {
                column name: "FirstName"
                column name: "LastName"
			}
        }
    }
}

6.5.2.6 Database Indices

class Person {
    String firstName
    String address
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
        version false
        id column: 'person_id'
        firstName column: 'First_Name', index: 'Name_Idx'
        address column: 'Address', index: 'Name_Idx,Address_Index'
    }
}

Note that you cannot have any spaces in the value of the index attribute; in this example index:'Name_Idx, Address_Index' will cause an error.

6.5.2.7 Optimistic Locking and Versioning

If you're mapping to a legacy schema that doesn't have version columns (or there's some other reason why you don't want/need this feature) you can disable this with the version method:

class Person {
    …
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
        version false
    }
}

If you disable optimistic locking you are essentially on your own with regards to concurrent updates and are open to the risk of users losing data (due to data overriding) unless you use pessimistic locking

Version columns types

By default Grails maps the version property as a Long that gets incremented by one each time an instance is updated. But Hibernate also supports using a Timestamp, for example:

import java.sql.Timestamp
class Person {
    …
    Timestamp version
    static mapping = {
        table 'people'
    }
}

There's a slight risk that two updates occurring at nearly the same time on a fast server can end up with the same timestamp value but this risk is very low. One benefit of using a Timestamp instead of a Long is that you combine the optimistic locking and last-updated semantics into a single column.

6.5.2.8 Eager and Lazy Fetching

Lazy Collections

As discussed in the section on Eager and Lazy fetching, GORM collections are lazily loaded by default but you can change this behaviour with the ORM DSL. There are several options available to you, but the most common ones are:

• lazy: false
• fetch: 'join'

and they're used like this:

class Person {
    String firstName
    Pet pet
    static hasMany = [addresses: Address]
    static mapping = {
        addresses lazy: false
        pet fetch: 'join'
    }
}

class Address {
    String street
    String postCode
}

class Pet {
    String name
}

The first option, lazy: false , ensures that when a Person instance is loaded, its addresses collection is loaded at the same time with a second SELECT. The second option is basically the same, except the collection is loaded with a JOIN rather than another SELECT. Typically you want to reduce the number of queries, so fetch: 'join' is the more appropriate option. On the other hand, it could feasibly be the more expensive approach if your domain model and data result in more and larger results than would otherwise be necessary.

For more advanced users, the other settings available are:

1. batchSize: N
2. lazy: false, batchSize: N

where N is an integer. These let you fetch results in batches, with one query per batch. As a simple example, consider this mapping for Person:

class Person {
    String firstName
    Pet pet
    static mapping = {
        pet batchSize: 5
    }
}

Lazy Single-Ended Associations

In GORM, one-to-one and many-to-one associations are by default lazy. Non-lazy single ended associations can be problematic when you load many entities because each non-lazy association will result in an extra SELECT statement. If the associated entities also have non-lazy associations, the number of queries grows significantly!

Use the same technique as for lazy collections to make a one-to-one or many-to-one association non-lazy/eager:

class Person {
    String firstName
}

class Address {
    String street
    String postCode
    static belongsTo = [person: Person]
    static mapping = {
        person lazy: false
    }
}

Here we configure GORM to load the associated Person instance (through the person property) whenever an Address is loaded.

Lazy Single-Ended Associations and Proxies

Hibernate uses runtime-generated proxies to facilitate single-ended lazy associations; Hibernate dynamically subclasses the entity class to create the proxy.

Consider the previous example but with a lazily-loaded person association: Hibernate will set the person property to a proxy that is a subclass of Person. When you call any of the getters (except for the id property) or setters on that proxy, Hibernate will load the entity from the database.

Unfortunately this technique can produce surprising results. Consider the following example classes:

class Pet {
    String name
}

class Dog extends Pet {
}

class Person {
    String name
    Pet pet
}

and assume that we have a single Person instance with a Dog as the pet. The following code will work as you would expect:

def person = Person.get(1)
assert person.pet instanceof Dog
assert Pet.get(person.petId) instanceof Dog

But this won't:

def person = Person.get(1)
assert person.pet instanceof Dog
assert Pet.list()[0] instanceof Dog

The second assertion fails, and to add to the confusion, this will work:

assert Pet.list()[0] instanceof Dog

What's going on here? It's down to a combination of how proxies work and the guarantees that the Hibernate session makes. When you load the Person instance, Hibernate creates a proxy for its pet relation and attaches it to the session. Once that happens, whenever you retrieve that Pet instance with a query, a get(), or the pet relation within the same session , Hibernate gives you the proxy.

Fortunately for us, GORM automatically unwraps the proxy when you use get() and findBy*(), or when you directly access the relation. That means you don't have to worry at all about proxies in the majority of cases. But GORM doesn't do that for objects returned with a query that returns a list, such as list() and findAllBy*(). However, if Hibernate hasn't attached the proxy to the session, those queries will return the real instances - hence why the last example works.

You can protect yourself to a degree from this problem by using the instanceOf method by GORM:

def person = Person.get(1)
assert Pet.list()[0].instanceOf(Dog)

However, it won't help here if casting is involved. For example, the following code will throw a ClassCastException because the first pet in the list is a proxy instance with a class that is neither Dog nor a sub-class of Dog:

def person = Person.get(1)
Dog pet = Pet.list()[0]

Of course, it's best not to use static types in this situation. If you use an untyped variable for the pet instead, you can access any Dog properties or methods on the instance without any problems.

These days it's rare that you will come across this issue, but it's best to be aware of it just in case. At least you will know why such an error occurs and be able to work around it.

6.5.2.9 Custom Cascade Behaviour

However, the ORM DSL gives you complete access to Hibernate's transitive persistence capabilities using the cascade attribute.

Valid settings for the cascade attribute include:

• merge - merges the state of a detached association
• save-update - cascades only saves and updates to an association
• delete - cascades only deletes to an association
• lock - useful if a pessimistic lock should be cascaded to its associations
• refresh - cascades refreshes to an association
• evict - cascades evictions (equivalent to discard() in GORM) to associations if set
• all - cascade all operations to associations
• all-delete-orphan - Applies only to one-to-many associations and indicates that when a child is removed from an association then it should be automatically deleted. Children are also deleted when the parent is.

It is advisable to read the section in the Hibernate documentation on transitive persistence to obtain a better understanding of the different cascade styles and recommendations for their usage

To specify the cascade attribute simply define one or more (comma-separated) of the aforementioned settings as its value:

class Person {
    String firstName
    static hasMany = [addresses: Address]
    static mapping = {
        addresses cascade: "all-delete-orphan"
    }
}

class Address {
    String street
    String postCode
}

6.5.2.10 Custom Hibernate Types

The Hibernate reference manual has some information on custom types, but here we will focus on how to map them in Grails. Let's start by taking a look at a simple domain class that uses an old-fashioned (pre-Java 1.5) type-safe enum class:

class Book {
    String title
    String author
    Rating rating
    static mapping = {
        rating type: RatingUserType
    }
}

All we have done is declare the rating field the enum type and set the property's type in the custom mapping to the corresponding UserType implementation. That's all you have to do to start using your custom type. If you want, you can also use the other column settings such as "column" to change the column name and "index" to add it to an index.

Custom types aren't limited to just a single column - they can be mapped to as many columns as you want. In such cases you explicitly define in the mapping what columns to use, since Hibernate can only use the property name for a single column. Fortunately, Grails lets you map multiple columns to a property using this syntax:

class Book {
    String title
    Name author
    Rating rating
    static mapping = {
        author type: NameUserType, {
            column name: "first_name"
            column name: "last_name"
        }
        rating type: RatingUserType
    }
}

The above example will create "first_name" and "last_name" columns for the author property. You'll be pleased to know that you can also use some of the normal column/property mapping attributes in the column definitions. For example:

column name: "first_name", index: "my_idx", unique: true

The column definitions do not support the following attributes: type, cascade, lazy, cache, and joinTable.

One thing to bear in mind with custom types is that they define the SQL types for the corresponding database columns. That helps take the burden of configuring them yourself, but what happens if you have a legacy database that uses a different SQL type for one of the columns? In that case, override the column's SQL type using the sqlType attribute:

class Book {
    String title
    Name author
    Rating rating
    static mapping = {
        author type: NameUserType, {
            column name: "first_name", sqlType: "text"
            column name: "last_name", sqlType: "text"
        }
        rating type: RatingUserType, sqlType: "text"
    }
}

Mind you, the SQL type you specify needs to still work with the custom type. So overriding a default of "varchar" with "text" is fine, but overriding "text" with "yes_no" isn't going to work.

6.5.2.11 Derived Properties

class Product {
    Float price
    Float taxRate
    Float tax
}

If the tax property is derived based on the value of price and taxRate properties then is probably no need to persist the tax property. The SQL used to derive the value of a derived property may be expressed in the ORM DSL like this:

class Product {
    Float price
    Float taxRate
    Float tax
    static mapping = {
        tax formula: 'PRICE * TAX_RATE'
    }
}

Note that the formula expressed in the ORM DSL is SQL so references to other properties should relate to the persistence model not the object model, which is why the example refers to PRICE and TAX_RATE instead of price and taxRate.

With that in place, when a Product is retrieved with something like Product.get(42), the SQL that is generated to support that will look something like this:

select
    product0_.id as id1_0_,
    product0_.version as version1_0_,
    product0_.price as price1_0_,
    product0_.tax_rate as tax4_1_0_,
    product0_.PRICE * product0_.TAX_RATE as formula1_0_
from
    product product0_
where
    product0_.id=?

Since the tax property is derived at runtime and not stored in the database it might seem that the same effect could be achieved by adding a method like getTax() to the Product class that simply returns the product of the taxRate and price properties. With an approach like that you would give up the ability query the database based on the value of the tax property. Using a derived property allows exactly that. To retrieve all Product objects that have a tax value greater than 21.12 you could execute a query like this:

Product.findAllByTaxGreaterThan(21.12)

Derived properties may be referenced in the Criteria API:

Product.withCriteria {
    gt 'tax', 21.12f
}

The SQL that is generated to support either of those would look something like this:

select
    this_.id as id1_0_,
    this_.version as version1_0_,
    this_.price as price1_0_,
    this_.tax_rate as tax4_1_0_,
    this_.PRICE * this_.TAX_RATE as formula1_0_
from
    product this_
where
    this_.PRICE * this_.TAX_RATE>?

Because the value of a derived property is generated in the database and depends on the execution of SQL code, derived properties may not have GORM constraints applied to them. If constraints are specified for a derived property, they will be ignored.

6.5.2.12 Custom Naming Strategy

Configure the class name to be used in grails-app/conf/DataSource.groovy in the hibernate section, e.g.

dataSource {
    pooled = true
    dbCreate = "create-drop"
    …
}
hibernate {
    cache.use_second_level_cache = true
    …
    naming_strategy = com.myco.myproj.CustomNamingStrategy
}

You can also specify the name of the class and it will be loaded for you:

hibernate {
    …
    naming_strategy = 'com.myco.myproj.CustomNamingStrategy'
}

A third option is to provide an instance if there is some configuration required beyond calling the default constructor:

hibernate {
    …
    def strategy = new com.myco.myproj.CustomNamingStrategy()
    // configure as needed
    naming_strategy = strategy
}

You can use an existing class or write your own, for example one that prefixes table names and column names:

package com.myco.myproj
import org.hibernate.cfg.ImprovedNamingStrategy
import org.hibernate.util.StringHelper
class CustomNamingStrategy extends ImprovedNamingStrategy {
    String classToTableName(String className) {
        "table_" + StringHelper.unqualify(className)
    }
    String propertyToColumnName(String propertyName) {
        "col_" + StringHelper.unqualify(propertyName)
    }
}

6.5.3 Default Sort Order

def airports = Airport.list(sort:'name')

However, you can also declare the default sort order for a collection in the mapping:

class Airport {
    …
    static mapping = {
        sort "name"
    }
}

The above means that all collections of Airport instances will by default be sorted by the airport name. If you also want to change the sort order , use this syntax:

class Airport {
    …
    static mapping = {
        sort name: "desc"
    }
}

Finally, you can configure sorting at the association level:

class Airport {
    …
    static hasMany = [flights: Flight]
    static mapping = {
        flights sort: 'number', order: 'desc'
    }
}

In this case, the flights collection will always be sorted in descending order of flight number.

These mappings will not work for default unidirectional one-to-many or many-to-many relationships because they involve a join table. See this issue for more details. Consider using a SortedSet or queries with sort parameters to fetch the data you need.

6.6 Programmatic Transactions

Here's an example of using withTransaction in a controller methods:

def transferFunds() {
    Account.withTransaction { status ->
        def source = Account.get(params.from)
        def dest = Account.get(params.to)
        def amount = params.amount.toInteger()
        if (source.active) {
            if (dest.active) {
                source.balance -= amount
                dest.amount += amount
            }
            else {
                status.setRollbackOnly()
            }
        }
    }
}

In this example we rollback the transaction if the destination account is not active. Also, if an unchecked Exception or Error (but not a checked Exception, even though Groovy doesn't require that you catch checked exceptions) is thrown during the process the transaction will automatically be rolled back.

You can also use "save points" to rollback a transaction to a particular point in time if you don't want to rollback the entire transaction. This can be achieved through the use of Spring's SavePointManager interface.

The withTransaction method deals with the begin/commit/rollback logic for you within the scope of the block.

6.7 GORM and Constraints

Where feasible, Grails uses a domain class's constraints to influence the database columns generated for the corresponding domain class properties.

Consider the following example. Suppose we have a domain model with the following properties:

String name
String description

By default, in MySQL, Grails would define these columns as

But perhaps the business rules for this domain class state that a description can be up to 1000 characters in length. If that were the case, we would likely define the column as follows if we were creating the table with an SQL script.

Chances are we would also want to have some application-based validation to make sure we don't exceed that 1000 character limit before we persist any records. In Grails, we achieve this validation with constraints. We would add the following constraint declaration to the domain class.

static constraints = {
    description maxSize: 1000
}

This constraint would provide both the application-based validation we want and it would also cause the schema to be generated as shown above. Below is a description of the other constraints that influence schema generation.

Constraints Affecting String Properties

• inList
• maxSize
• size

If either the maxSize or the size constraint is defined, Grails sets the maximum column length based on the constraint value.

In general, it's not advisable to use both constraints on the same domain class property. However, if both the maxSize constraint and the size constraint are defined, then Grails sets the column length to the minimum of the maxSize constraint and the upper bound of the size constraint. (Grails uses the minimum of the two, because any length that exceeds that minimum will result in a validation error.)

If the inList constraint is defined (and the maxSize and the size constraints are not defined), then Grails sets the maximum column length based on the length of the longest string in the list of valid values. For example, given a list including values "Java", "Groovy", and "C++", Grails would set the column length to 6 (i.e., the number of characters in the string "Groovy").

Constraints Affecting Numeric Properties

• min
• max
• range

If the max, min, or range constraint is defined, Grails attempts to set the column precision based on the constraint value. (The success of this attempted influence is largely dependent on how Hibernate interacts with the underlying DBMS.)

In general, it's not advisable to combine the pair min/max and range constraints together on the same domain class property. However, if both of these constraints is defined, then Grails uses the minimum precision value from the constraints. (Grails uses the minimum of the two, because any length that exceeds that minimum precision will result in a validation error.)

• scale

If the scale constraint is defined, then Grails attempts to set the column scale based on the constraint value. This rule only applies to floating point numbers (i.e., java.lang.Float, java.Lang.Double, java.lang.BigDecimal, or subclasses of java.lang.BigDecimal). The success of this attempted influence is largely dependent on how Hibernate interacts with the underlying DBMS.

The constraints define the minimum/maximum numeric values, and Grails derives the maximum number of digits for use in the precision. Keep in mind that specifying only one of min/max constraints will not affect schema generation (since there could be large negative value of property with max:100, for example), unless the specified constraint value requires more digits than default Hibernate column precision is (19 at the moment). For example:

someFloatValue max: 1000000, scale: 3

would yield:

someFloatValue DECIMAL(19, 3) // precision is default

but

someFloatValue max: 12345678901234567890, scale: 5

would yield:

someFloatValue DECIMAL(25, 5) // precision = digits in max + scale

and

someFloatValue max: 100, min: -100000

would yield:

someFloatValue DECIMAL(8, 2) // precision = digits in min + default scale

7 The Web Layer

7.1 Controllers

The default URL Mapping configuration ensures that the first part of your controller name is mapped to a URI and each action defined within your controller maps to URIs within the controller name URI.

7.1.1 Understanding Controllers and Actions

Creating a controller

Controllers can be created with the create-controller or generate-controller command. For example try running the following command from the root of a Grails project:

grails create-controller book

The command will create a controller at the location grails-app/controllers/myapp/BookController.groovy:

package myapp
class BookController {
    def index() { }
}

where "myapp" will be the name of your application, the default package name if one isn't specified.

BookController by default maps to the /book URI (relative to your application root).

The create-controller and generate-controller commands are just for convenience and you can just as easily create controllers using your favorite text editor or IDE

Creating Actions

A controller can have multiple public action methods; each one maps to a URI:

class BookController {
    def list() {
        // do controller logic
        // create model
        return model
    }
}

This example maps to the /book/list URI by default thanks to the property being named list.

Public Methods as Actions

In earlier versions of Grails actions were implemented with Closures. This is still supported, but the preferred approach is to use methods.

Leveraging methods instead of Closure properties has some advantages:

• Memory efficient
• Allow use of stateless controllers (singleton scope)
• You can override actions from subclasses and call the overridden superclass method with super.actionName()
• Methods can be intercepted with standard proxying mechanisms, something that is complicated to do with Closures since they're fields.

If you prefer the Closure syntax or have older controller classes created in earlier versions of Grails and still want the advantages of using methods, you can set the grails.compile.artefacts.closures.convert property to true in BuildConfig.groovy:

grails.compile.artefacts.closures.convert = true

and a compile-time AST transformation will convert your Closures to methods in the generated bytecode.

If a controller class extends some other class which is not defined under the grails-app/controllers/ directory, methods inherited from that class are not converted to controller actions. If the intent is to expose those inherited methods as controller actions the methods may be overridden in the subclass and the subclass method may invoke the method in the super class.

The Default Action

A controller has the concept of a default URI that maps to the root URI of the controller, for example /book for BookController. The action that is called when the default URI is requested is dictated by the following rules:

• If there is only one action, it's the default
• If you have an action named index, it's the default
• Alternatively you can set it explicitly with the defaultAction property:

static defaultAction = "list"

7.1.2 Controllers and Scopes

Available Scopes

Scopes are hash-like objects where you can store variables. The following scopes are available to controllers:

• servletContext - Also known as application scope, this scope lets you share state across the entire web application. The servletContext is an instance of ServletContext
• session - The session allows associating state with a given user and typically uses cookies to associate a session with a client. The session object is an instance of HttpSession
• request - The request object allows the storage of objects for the current request only. The request object is an instance of HttpServletRequest
• params - Mutable map of incoming request query string or POST parameters
• flash - See below

Accessing Scopes

Scopes can be accessed using the variable names above in combination with Groovy's array index operator, even on classes provided by the Servlet API such as the HttpServletRequest:

class BookController {
    def find() {
        def findBy = params["findBy"]
        def appContext = request["foo"]
        def loggedUser = session["logged_user"]
    }
}

You can also access values within scopes using the de-reference operator, making the syntax even more clear:

class BookController {
    def find() {
        def findBy = params.findBy
        def appContext = request.foo
        def loggedUser = session.logged_user
    }
}

This is one of the ways that Grails unifies access to the different scopes.

Using Flash Scope

Grails supports the concept of flash scope as a temporary store to make attributes available for this request and the next request only. Afterwards the attributes are cleared. This is useful for setting a message directly before redirecting, for example:

def delete() {
    def b = Book.get(params.id)
    if (!b) {
        flash.message = "User not found for id ${params.id}"
        redirect(action:list)
    }
    … // remaining code
}

When the list action is requested, the message value will be in scope and can be used to display an information message. It will be removed from the flash scope after this second request.

Note that the attribute name can be anything you want, and the values are often strings used to display messages, but can be any object type.

Scoped Controllers

Supported controller scopes are:

• prototype (default) - A new controller will be created for each request (recommended for actions as Closure properties)
• session - One controller is created for the scope of a user session
• singleton - Only one instance of the controller ever exists (recommended for actions as methods)

To enable one of the scopes, add a static scope property to your class with one of the valid scope values listed above, for example

static scope = "singleton"

You can define the default strategy under in Config.groovy with the grails.controllers.defaultScope key, for example:

grails.controllers.defaultScope = "singleton"

Newly created applications have the grails.controllers.defaultScope property set in grails-app/conf/Config.groovy with a value of "singleton". You may change this value to any of the supported scopes listed above. If the property is not assigned a value at all, controllers will default to "prototype" scope.

Use scoped controllers wisely. For instance, we don't recommend having any properties in a singleton-scoped controller since they will be shared for all requests.

7.1.3 Models and Views

Returning the Model

A model is a Map that the view uses when rendering. The keys within that Map correspond to variable names accessible by the view. There are a couple of ways to return a model. First, you can explicitly return a Map instance:

def show() {
    [book: Book.get(params.id)]
}

The above does not reflect what you should use with the scaffolding views - see the scaffolding section for more details.

A more advanced approach is to return an instance of the Spring ModelAndView class:

import org.springframework.web.servlet.ModelAndView
def index() {
    // get some books just for the index page, perhaps your favorites
    def favoriteBooks = ...
    // forward to the list view to show them
    return new ModelAndView("/book/list", [ bookList : favoriteBooks ])
}

One thing to bear in mind is that certain variable names can not be used in your model:

• attributes
• application

Currently, no error will be reported if you do use them, but this will hopefully change in a future version of Grails.

Selecting the View

In both of the previous two examples there was no code that specified which view to render. So how does Grails know which one to pick? The answer lies in the conventions. Grails will look for a view at the location grails-app/views/book/show.gsp for this show action:

class BookController {
    def show() {
         [book: Book.get(params.id)]
    }
}

To render a different view, use the render method:

def show() {
    def map = [book: Book.get(params.id)]
    render(view: "display", model: map)
}

In this case Grails will attempt to render a view at the location grails-app/views/book/display.gsp. Notice that Grails automatically qualifies the view location with the book directory of the grails-app/views directory. This is convenient, but to access shared views you need instead you can use an absolute path instead of a relative one:

def show() {
    def map = [book: Book.get(params.id)]
    render(view: "/shared/display", model: map)
}

In this case Grails will attempt to render a view at the location grails-app/views/shared/display.gsp.

Grails also supports JSPs as views, so if a GSP isn't found in the expected location but a JSP is, it will be used instead.

Selecting Views For Namespaced Controllers

If a controller defines a namespace for itself with the namespace property that will affect the root directory in which Grails will look for views which are specified with a relative path. The default root directory for views rendered by a namespaced controller is grails-app/views/<namespace name>/<controller name>/. If the view is not found in the namespaced directory then Grails will fallback to looking for the view in the non-namespaced directory.

See the example below.

class ReportingController {
    static namespace = 'business'
    def humanResources() {
        // This will render grails-app/views/business/reporting/humanResources.gsp
        // if it exists.
        // If grails-app/views/business/reporting/humanResources.gsp does not
        // exist the fallback will be grails-app/views/reporting/humanResources.gsp.
        // The namespaced GSP will take precedence over the non-namespaced GSP.
        [numberOfEmployees: 9]
    }

    def accountsReceivable() {
        // This will render grails-app/views/business/reporting/accounting.gsp
        // if it exists.
        // If grails-app/views/business/reporting/accounting.gsp does not
        // exist the fallback will be grails-app/views/reporting/accounting.gsp.
        // The namespaced GSP will take precedence over the non-namespaced GSP.
        render view: 'numberCrunch', model: [numberOfEmployees: 13]
    }
}

Rendering a Response

Sometimes it's easier (for example with Ajax applications) to render snippets of text or code to the response directly from the controller. For this, the highly flexible render method can be used:

render "Hello World!"

The above code writes the text "Hello World!" to the response. Other examples include:

// write some markup
render {
   for (b in books) {
      div(id: b.id, b.title)
   }
}

// render a specific view
render(view: 'show')

// render a template for each item in a collection
render(template: 'book_template', collection: Book.list())

// render some text with encoding and content type
render(text: "<xml>some xml</xml>", contentType: "text/xml", encoding: "UTF-8")

If you plan on using Groovy's MarkupBuilder to generate HTML for use with the render method be careful of naming clashes between HTML elements and Grails tags, for example:

import groovy.xml.MarkupBuilder
…
def login() {
    def writer = new StringWriter()
    def builder = new MarkupBuilder(writer)
    builder.html {
        head {
            title 'Log in'
        }
        body {
            h1 'Hello'
            form {
            }
        }
    }
    def html = writer.toString()
    render html
}

This will actually call the form tag (which will return some text that will be ignored by the MarkupBuilder). To correctly output a <form> element, use the following:

def login() {
    // …
    body {
        h1 'Hello'
        builder.form {
        }
    }
    // …
}

7.1.4 Redirects and Chaining

Redirects

Actions can be redirected using the redirect controller method:

class OverviewController {
    def login() {}
    def find() {
        if (!session.user)
            redirect(action: 'login')
            return
        }
        …
    }
}

Internally the redirect method uses the HttpServletResponse object's sendRedirect method.

The redirect method expects one of:

• Another closure within the same controller class:

// Call the login action within the same class
redirect(action: login)

• The name of an action (and controller name if the redirect isn't to an action in the current controller):

// Also redirects to the index action in the home controller
redirect(controller: 'home', action: 'index')

• A URI for a resource relative the application context path:

// Redirect to an explicit URI
redirect(uri: "/login.html")

• Or a full URL:

// Redirect to a URL
redirect(url: "http://grails.org")

Parameters can optionally be passed from one action to the next using the params argument of the method:

redirect(action: 'myaction', params: [myparam: "myvalue"])

These parameters are made available through the params dynamic property that accesses request parameters. If a parameter is specified with the same name as a request parameter, the request parameter is overridden and the controller parameter is used.

Since the params object is a Map, you can use it to pass the current request parameters from one action to the next:

redirect(action: "next", params: params)

Finally, you can also include a fragment in the target URI:

redirect(controller: "test", action: "show", fragment: "profile")

which will (depending on the URL mappings) redirect to something like "/myapp/test/show#profile".

Chaining

Actions can also be chained. Chaining allows the model to be retained from one action to the next. For example calling the first action in this action:

class ExampleChainController {
    def first() {
        chain(action: second, model: [one: 1])
    }
    def second () {
        chain(action: third, model: [two: 2])
    }
    def third() {
        [three: 3])
    }
}

results in the model:

[one: 1, two: 2, three: 3]

The model can be accessed in subsequent controller actions in the chain using the chainModel map. This dynamic property only exists in actions following the call to the chain method:

class ChainController {
    def nextInChain() {
        def model = chainModel.myModel
        …
    }
}

Like the redirect method you can also pass parameters to the chain method:

chain(action: "action1", model: [one: 1], params: [myparam: "param1"])

7.1.5 Controller Interceptors

If your interceptor is likely to apply to more than one controller, you are almost certainly better off writing a standalone Interceptor. Standaline Interceptors can be applied to multiple controllers or URIs without the need to change the logic of each controller

Before Interception

The beforeInterceptor intercepts processing before the action is executed. If it returns false then the intercepted action will not be executed. The interceptor can be defined for all actions in a controller as follows:

def beforeInterceptor = {
    println "Tracing action ${actionUri}"
}

The above is declared inside the body of the controller definition. It will be executed before all actions and does not interfere with processing. A common use case is very simplistic authentication:

def beforeInterceptor = [action: this.&auth, except: 'login']
// defined with private scope, so it's not considered an action
private auth() {
    if (!session.user) {
        redirect(action: 'login')
        return false
    }
}
def login() {
    // display login page
}

The above code defines a method called auth. A private method is used so that it is not exposed as an action to the outside world. The beforeInterceptor then defines an interceptor that is used on all actions except the login action and it executes the auth method. The auth method is referenced using Groovy's method pointer syntax. Within the method it detects whether there is a user in the session, and if not it redirects to the login action and returns false, causing the intercepted action to not be processed.

After Interception

Use the afterInterceptor property to define an interceptor that is executed after an action:

def afterInterceptor = { model ->
    println "Tracing action ${actionUri}"
}

The after interceptor takes the resulting model as an argument and can hence manipulate the model or response.

An after interceptor may also modify the Spring MVC ModelAndView object prior to rendering. In this case, the above example becomes:

def afterInterceptor = { model, modelAndView ->
    println "Current view is ${modelAndView.viewName}"
    if (model.someVar) modelAndView.viewName = "/mycontroller/someotherview"
    println "View is now ${modelAndView.viewName}"
}

This allows the view to be changed based on the model returned by the current action. Note that the modelAndView may be null if the action being intercepted called redirect or render.

Interception Conditions

Rails users will be familiar with the authentication example and how the 'except' condition was used when executing the interceptor (interceptors are called 'filters' in Rails; this terminology conflicts with Servlet filter terminology in Java):

def beforeInterceptor = [action: this.&auth, except: 'login']

This executes the interceptor for all actions except the specified action. A list of actions can also be defined as follows:

def beforeInterceptor = [action: this.&auth, except: ['login', 'register']]

The other supported condition is 'only', this executes the interceptor for only the specified action(s):

def beforeInterceptor = [action: this.&auth, only: ['secure']]

7.1.6 Data Binding

Map Based Binding

The data binder is capable of converting and assigning values in a Map to properties of an object. The binder will associate entries in the Map to properties of the object using the keys in the Map that have values which correspond to property names on the object. The following code demonstrates the basics:

// grails-app/domain/Person.groovy
class Person {
    String firstName
    String lastName
    Integer age
}

def bindingMap = [firstName: 'Peter', lastName: 'Gabriel', age: 63]
def person = new Person(bindingMap)
assert person.firstName == 'Peter'
assert person.lastName == 'Gabriel'
assert person.age == 63

To update properties of a domain object you may assign a Map to the properties property of the domain class:

def bindingMap = [firstName: 'Peter', lastName: 'Gabriel', age: 63]
def person = Person.get(someId)
person.properties = bindingMap
assert person.firstName == 'Peter'
assert person.lastName == 'Gabriel'
assert person.age == 63

The binder can populate a full graph of objects using Maps of Maps.

class Person {
    String firstName
    String lastName
    Integer age
    Address homeAddress
}
class Address {
    String county
    String country
}

def bindingMap = [firstName: 'Peter', lastName: 'Gabriel', age: 63, homeAddress: [county: 'Surrey', country: 'England'] ]
def person = new Person(bindingMap)
assert person.firstName == 'Peter'
assert person.lastName == 'Gabriel'
assert person.age == 63
assert person.homeAddress.county == 'Surrey'
assert person.homeAddress.country == 'England'

Binding To Collections And Maps

The data binder can populate and update Collections and Maps. The following code shows a simple example of populating a List of objects in a domain class:

class Band {
    String name
    static hasMany = [albums: Album]
    List albums
}
class Album {
    String title
    Integer numberOfTracks
}

def bindingMap = [name: 'Genesis', 
                  'albums[0]': [title: 'Foxtrot', numberOfTracks: 6], 
                  'albums[1]': [title: 'Nursery Cryme', numberOfTracks: 7]]
def band = new Band(bindingMap)
assert band.name == 'Genesis'
assert band.albums.size() == 2
assert band.albums[0].title == 'Foxtrot'
assert band.albums[0].numberOfTracks == 6
assert band.albums[1].title == 'Nursery Cryme'
assert band.albums[1].numberOfTracks == 7

That code would work in the same way if albums were an array instead of a List.

Note that when binding to a Set the structure of the Map being bound to the Set is the same as that of a Map being bound to a List but since a Set is unordered, the indexes don't necessarily correspond to the order of elements in the Set. In the code example above, if albums were a Set instead of a List, the bindingMap could look exactly the same but 'Foxtrot' might be the first album in the Set or it might be the second. When updating existing elements in a Set the Map being assigned to the Set must have id elements in it which represent the element in the Set being updated, as in the following example:

/*
 * The value of the indexes 0 and 1 in albums[0] and albums[1] are arbitrary
 * values that can be anything as long as they are unique within the Map.
 * They do not correspond to the order of elements in albums because albums
 * is a Set.
 */
def bindingMap = ['albums[0]': [id: 9, title: 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway']
                  'albums[1]': [id: 4, title: 'Selling England By The Pound']]
def band = Band.get(someBandId)
/*
 * This will find the Album in albums that has an id of 9 and will set its title
 * to 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway' and will find the Album in albums that has
 * an id of 4 and set its title to 'Selling England By The Pound'.  In both 
 * cases if the Album cannot be found in albums then the album will be retrieved
 * from the database by id, the Album will be added to albums and will be updated 
 * with the values described above.  If a Album with the specified id cannot be
 * found in the database, then a binding error will be created and associated
 * with the band object.  More on binding errors later.
 */
band.properties = bindingMap

When binding to a Map the structure of the binding Map is the same as the structure of a Map used for binding to a List or a Set and the index inside of square brackets corresponds to the key in the Map being bound to. See the following code:

class Album {
    String title
    static hasMany = [players: Player]
    Map players
}
class Player {
    String name
}

def bindingMap = [title: 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway',
                  'players[guitar]': [name: 'Steve Hackett'],
                  'players[vocals]': [name: 'Peter Gabriel'],
                  'players[keyboards]': [name: 'Tony Banks']]
def album = new Album(bindingMap)
assert album.title == 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway'
assert album.players.size() == 3
assert album.players.guitar.name == 'Steve Hackett'
assert album.players.vocals.name == 'Peter Gabriel'
assert album.players.keyboards.name == 'Tony Banks'

When updating an existing Map, if the key specified in the binding Map does not exist in the Map being bound to then a new value will be created and added to the Map with the specified key as in the following example:

def bindingMap = [title: 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway',
                  'players[guitar]': [name: 'Steve Hackett'],
                  'players[vocals]': [name: 'Peter Gabriel']
                  'players[keyboards]': [name: 'Tony Banks']]
def album = new Album(bindingMap)
assert album.title == 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway'
assert album.players.size() == 3
assert album.players.guitar == 'Steve Hackett'
assert album.players.vocals == 'Peter Gabriel'
assert album.players.keyboards == 'Tony Banks'
def updatedBindingMap = ['players[drums]': [name: 'Phil Collins'],
                         'players[keyboards]': [name: 'Anthony George Banks']]
album.properties = updatedBindingMap
assert album.title == 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway'
assert album.players.size() == 4
assert album.players.guitar.name == 'Steve Hackett'
assert album.players.vocals.name == 'Peter Gabriel'
assert album.players.keyboards.name == 'Anthony George Banks'
assert album.players.drums.name == 'Phil Collins'

Binding Request Data to the Model

The params object that is available in a controller has special behavior that helps convert dotted request parameter names into nested Maps that the data binder can work with. For example, if a request includes request parameters named person.homeAddress.country and person.homeAddress.city with values 'USA' and 'St. Louis' respectively, params would include entries like these:

[person: [homeAddress: [country: 'USA', city: 'St. Louis']]]

There are two ways to bind request parameters onto the properties of a domain class. The first involves using a domain classes' Map constructor:

def save() {
    def b = new Book(params)
    b.save()
}

The data binding happens within the code new Book(params). By passing the params object to the domain class constructor Grails automatically recognizes that you are trying to bind from request parameters. So if we had an incoming request like:

/book/save?title=The%20Stand&author=Stephen%20King

Then the title and author request parameters would automatically be set on the domain class. You can use the properties property to perform data binding onto an existing instance:

def save() {
    def b = Book.get(params.id)
    b.properties = params
    b.save()
}

This has the same effect as using the implicit constructor.

When binding an empty String (a String with no characters in it, not even spaces), the data binder will convert the empty String to null. This simplifies the most common case where the intent is to treat an empty form field as having the value null since there isn't a way to actually submit a null as a request parameter. When this behavior is not desirable the application may assign the value directly.

The mass property binding mechanism will by default automatically trim all Strings at binding time. To disable this behavior set the grails.databinding.trimStrings property to false in grails-app/conf/Config.groovy.

// the default value is true
grails.databinding.trimStrings = false
// ...

The mass property binding mechanism will by default automatically convert all empty Strings to null at binding time. To disable this behavior set the grails.databinding.convertEmptyStringsToNull property to false in grials-app/conf/Config.groovy.

// the default value is true
grails.databinding.convertEmptyStringsToNull = false
// ...

The order of events is that the String trimming happens and then null conversion happens so if trimStrings is true and convertEmptyStringsToNull is true, not only will empty Strings be converted to null but also blank Strings. A blank String is any String such that the trim() method returns an empty String.

These forms of data binding in Grails are very convenient, but also indiscriminate. In other words, they will bind all non-transient, typed instance properties of the target object, including ones that you may not want bound. Just because the form in your UI doesn't submit all the properties, an attacker can still send malign data via a raw HTTP request. Fortunately, Grails also makes it easy to protect against such attacks - see the section titled "Data Binding and Security concerns" for more information.

Data binding and Single-ended Associations

If you have a one-to-one or many-to-one association you can use Grails' data binding capability to update these relationships too. For example if you have an incoming request such as:

/book/save?author.id=20

Grails will automatically detect the .id suffix on the request parameter and look up the Author instance for the given id when doing data binding such as:

def b = new Book(params)

An association property can be set to null by passing the literal String "null". For example:

/book/save?author.id=null

Data Binding and Many-ended Associations

If you have a one-to-many or many-to-many association there are different techniques for data binding depending of the association type.

If you have a Set based association (the default for a hasMany) then the simplest way to populate an association is to send a list of identifiers. For example consider the usage of <g:select> below:

<g:select name="books"
          from="${Book.list()}"
          size="5" multiple="yes" optionKey="id"
          value="${author?.books}" />

This produces a select box that lets you select multiple values. In this case if you submit the form Grails will automatically use the identifiers from the select box to populate the books association.

However, if you have a scenario where you want to update the properties of the associated objects the this technique won't work. Instead you use the subscript operator:

<g:textField name="books[0].title" value="the Stand" />
<g:textField name="books[1].title" value="the Shining" />

However, with Set based association it is critical that you render the mark-up in the same order that you plan to do the update in. This is because a Set has no concept of order, so although we're referring to books0 and books1 it is not guaranteed that the order of the association will be correct on the server side unless you apply some explicit sorting yourself.

This is not a problem if you use List based associations, since a List has a defined order and an index you can refer to. This is also true of Map based associations.

Note also that if the association you are binding to has a size of two and you refer to an element that is outside the size of association:

<g:textField name="books[0].title" value="the Stand" />
<g:textField name="books[1].title" value="the Shining" />
<g:textField name="books[2].title" value="Red Madder" />

Then Grails will automatically create a new instance for you at the defined position.

You can bind existing instances of the associated type to a List using the same .id syntax as you would use with a single-ended association. For example:

<g:select name="books[0].id" from="${bookList}"
          value="${author?.books[0]?.id}" />
<g:select name="books[1].id" from="${bookList}"
          value="${author?.books[1]?.id}" />
<g:select name="books[2].id" from="${bookList}"
          value="${author?.books[2]?.id}" />

Would allow individual entries in the books List to be selected separately.

Entries at particular indexes can be removed in the same way too. For example:

<g:select name="books[0].id"
          from="${Book.list()}"
          value="${author?.books[0]?.id}"
          noSelection="['null': '']"/>

Will render a select box that will remove the association at books0 if the empty option is chosen.

Binding to a Map property works the same way except that the list index in the parameter name is replaced by the map key:

<g:select name="images[cover].id"
          from="${Image.list()}"
          value="${book?.images[cover]?.id}"
          noSelection="['null': '']"/>

This would bind the selected image into the Map property images under a key of "cover".

When binding to Maps, Arrays and Collections the data binder will automatically grow the size of the collections as necessary. The default limit to how large the binder will grow a collection is 256. If the data binder encounters an entry that requires the collection be grown beyond that limit, the entry is ignored. The limit may be configured by assigning a value to the grails.databinding.autoGrowCollectionLimit property in Config.groovy.

// grails-app/conf/Config.groovy
// the default value is 256
grails.databinding.autoGrowCollectionLimit = 128
// ...

Data binding with Multiple domain classes

It is possible to bind data to multiple domain objects from the params object.

For example so you have an incoming request to:

/book/save?book.title=The%20Stand&author.name=Stephen%20King

You'll notice the difference with the above request is that each parameter has a prefix such as author. or book. which is used to isolate which parameters belong to which type. Grails' params object is like a multi-dimensional hash and you can index into it to isolate only a subset of the parameters to bind.

def b = new Book(params.book)

Notice how we use the prefix before the first dot of the book.title parameter to isolate only parameters below this level to bind. We could do the same with an Author domain class:

def a = new Author(params.author)

Data Binding and Action Arguments

Controller action arguments are subject to request parameter data binding. There are 2 categories of controller action arguments. The first category is command objects. Complex types are treated as command objects. See the Command Objects section of the user guide for details. The other category is basic object types. Supported types are the 8 primitives, their corresponding type wrappers and java.lang.String. The default behavior is to map request parameters to action arguments by name:

class AccountingController {
   // accountNumber will be initialized with the value of params.accountNumber
   // accountType will be initialized with params.accountType
   def displayInvoice(String accountNumber, int accountType) {
       // …
   }
}

For primitive arguments and arguments which are instances of any of the primitive type wrapper classes a type conversion has to be carried out before the request parameter value can be bound to the action argument. The type conversion happens automatically. In a case like the example shown above, the params.accountType request parameter has to be converted to an int. If type conversion fails for any reason, the argument will have its default value per normal Java behavior (null for type wrapper references, false for booleans and zero for numbers) and a corresponding error will be added to the errors property of the defining controller.

/accounting/displayInvoice?accountNumber=B59786&accountType=bogusValue

Since "bogusValue" cannot be converted to type int, the value of accountType will be zero, the controller's errors.hasErrors() will be true, the controller's errors.errorCount will be equal to 1 and the controller's errors.getFieldError('accountType') will contain the corresponding error.

If the argument name does not match the name of the request parameter then the @grails.web.RequestParameter annotation may be applied to an argument to express the name of the request parameter which should be bound to that argument:

import grails.web.RequestParameter
class AccountingController {
   // mainAccountNumber will be initialized with the value of params.accountNumber
   // accountType will be initialized with params.accountType
   def displayInvoice(@RequestParameter('accountNumber') String mainAccountNumber, int accountType) {
       // …
   }
}

Data binding and type conversion errors

Sometimes when performing data binding it is not possible to convert a particular String into a particular target type. This results in a type conversion error. Grails will retain type conversion errors inside the errors property of a Grails domain class. For example:

class Book {
    …
    URL publisherURL
}

Here we have a domain class Book that uses the java.net.URL class to represent URLs. Given an incoming request such as:

/book/save?publisherURL=a-bad-url

it is not possible to bind the string a-bad-url to the publisherURL property as a type mismatch error occurs. You can check for these like this:

def b = new Book(params)
if (b.hasErrors()) {
    println "The value ${b.errors.getFieldError('publisherURL').rejectedValue}" +
            " is not a valid URL!"
}

Although we have not yet covered error codes (for more information see the section on Validation), for type conversion errors you would want a message from the grails-app/i18n/messages.properties file to use for the error. You can use a generic error message handler such as:

typeMismatch.java.net.URL=The field {0} is not a valid URL

Or a more specific one:

typeMismatch.Book.publisherURL=The publisher URL you specified is not a valid URL

The BindUsing Annotation

The BindUsing annotation may be used to define a custom binding mechanism for a particular field in a class. Any time data binding is being applied to the field the closure value of the annotation will be invoked with 2 arguments. The first argument is the object that data binding is being applied to and the second argument is DataBindingSource which is the data source for the data binding. The value returned from the closure will be bound to the property. The following example would result in the upper case version of the name value in the source being applied to the name field during data binding.

import org.grails.databinding.BindUsing
class SomeClass {
    @BindUsing({obj, source ->
        //source is DataSourceBinding which is similar to a Map
        //and defines getAt operation but source.name cannot be used here.
        //In order to get name from source use getAt instead as shown below.
        source['name']?.toUpperCase()
    })
    String name
}

Note that data binding is only possible when the name of the request parameter matches with the field name in the class. Here, name from request parameters matches with name from SomeClass.

The BindUsing annotation may be used to define a custom binding mechanism for all of the fields on a particular class. When the annotation is applied to a class, the value assigned to the annotation should be a class which implements the BindingHelper interface. An instance of that class will be used any time a value is bound to a property in the class that this annotation has been applied to.

@BindUsing(SomeClassWhichImplementsBindingHelper)
class SomeClass {
    String someProperty
    Integer someOtherProperty
}

Custom Data Converters

The binder will do a lot of type conversion automatically. Some applications may want to define their own mechanism for converting values and a simple way to do this is to write a class which implements ValueConverter and register an instance of that class as a bean in the Spring application context.

package com.myapp.converters
import org.grails.databinding.converters.ValueConverter
/**
 * A custom converter which will convert String of the
 * form 'city:state' into an Address object.
 */
class AddressValueConverter implements ValueConverter {
    boolean canConvert(value) {
        value instanceof String
    }
    def convert(value) {
        def pieces = value.split(':')
        new com.myapp.Address(city: pieces[0], state: pieces[1])
    }
    Class<?> getTargetType() {
        com.myapp.Address
    }
}

An instance of that class needs to be registered as a bean in the Spring application context. The bean name is not important. All beans that implemented ValueConverter will be automatically plugged in to the data binding process.

// grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy
beans = {
    addressConverter com.myapp.converters.AddressValueConverter
    // ...
}

class Person {
    String firstName
    Address homeAddress
}
class Address {
    String city
    String state
}
def person = new Person()
person.properties = [firstName: 'Jeff', homeAddress: "O'Fallon:Missouri"]
assert person.firstName == 'Jeff'
assert person.homeAddress.city = "O'Fallon"
assert person.homeAddress.state = 'Missouri'

Date Formats For Data Binding

A custom date format may be specified to be used when binding a String to a Date value by applying the BindingFormat annotation to a Date field.

import org.grails.databinding.BindingFormat
class Person {
    @BindingFormat('MMddyyyy')
    Date birthDate
}

A global setting may be configured in Config.groovy to define date formats which will be used application wide when binding to Date.

// grails-app/conf/Config.groovy
grails.databinding.dateFormats = ['MMddyyyy', 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.S', "yyyy-MM-dd'T'hh:mm:ss'Z'"]

The formats specified in grails.databinding.dateFormats will be attempted in the order in which they are included in the List. If a property is marked with @BindingFormat, the @BindingFormat will take precedence over the values specified in grails.databinding.dateFormats.

The default formats that are used are "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.S" and "yyyy-MM-dd'T'hh:mm:ss'Z'".

Custom Formatted Converters

You may supply your own handler for the BindingFormat annotation by writing a class which implements the FormattedValueConverter interface and registering an instance of that class as a bean in the Spring application context. Below is an example of a trivial custom String formatter that might convert the case of a String based on the value assigned to the BindingFormat annotation.

package com.myapp.converters
import org.grails.databinding.converters.FormattedValueConverter
class FormattedStringValueConverter implements FormattedValueConverter {
    def convert(value, String format) {
        if('UPPERCASE' == format) {
            value = value.toUpperCase()
        } else if('LOWERCASE' == format) {
            value = value.toLowerCase()
        }
        value
    }
    Class getTargetType() {
        // specifies the type to which this converter may be applied
        String
    }
}

An instance of that class needs to be registered as a bean in the Spring application context. The bean name is not important. All beans that implemented FormattedValueConverter will be automatically plugged in to the data binding process.

// grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy
beans = {
    formattedStringConverter com.myapp.converters.FormattedStringValueConverter
    // ...
}

With that in place the BindingFormat annotation may be applied to String fields to inform the data binder to take advantage of the custom converter.

import org.grails.databinding.BindingFormat
class Person {
    @BindingFormat('UPPERCASE')
    String someUpperCaseString
    @BindingFormat('LOWERCASE')
    String someLowerCaseString
    String someOtherString
}

Localized Binding Formats

The BindingFormat annotation supports localized format strings by using the optional code attribute. If a value is assigned to the code attribute that value will be used as the message code to retrieve the binding format string from the messageSource bean in the Spring application context and that lookup will be localized.

import org.grails.databinding.BindingFormat
class Person {
    @BindingFormat(code='date.formats.birthdays')
    Date birthDate
}

# grails-app/conf/i18n/messages.properties
date.formats.birthdays=MMddyyyy

# grails-app/conf/i18n/messages_es.properties
date.formats.birthdays=ddMMyyyy

Structured Data Binding Editors

A structured data binding editor is a helper class which can bind structured request parameters to a property. The common use case for structured binding is binding to a Date object which might be constructed from several smaller pieces of information contained in several request parameters with names like birthday_month, birthday_date and birthday_year. The structured editor would retrieve all of those individual pieces of information and use them to construct a Date.

The framework provides a structured editor for binding to Date objects. An application may register its own structured editors for whatever types are appropriate. Consider the following classes:

// src/groovy/databinding/Gadget.groovy
package databinding
class Gadget {
    Shape expandedShape
    Shape compressedShape
}

// src/groovy/databinding/Shape.groovy
package databinding
class Shape {
    int area
}

A Gadget has 2 Shape fields. A Shape has an area property. It may be that the application wants to accept request parameters like width and height and use those to calculate the area of a Shape at binding time. A structured binding editor is well suited for that.

The way to register a structured editor with the data binding process is to add an instance of the org.grails.databinding.TypedStructuredBindingEditor interface to the Spring application context. The easiest way to implement the TypedStructuredBindingEditor interface is to extend the org.grails.databinding.converters.AbstractStructuredBindingEditor abstract class and override the getPropertyValue method as shown below:

// src/groovy/databinding/converters/StructuredShapeEditor.groovy
package databinding.converters
import databinding.Shape
import org.grails.databinding.converters.AbstractStructuredBindingEditor
class StructuredShapeEditor extends AbstractStructuredBindingEditor<Shape> {
    public Shape getPropertyValue(Map values) {
        // retrieve the individual values from the Map
        def width = values.width as int
        def height = values.height as int
        // use the values to calculate the area of the Shape
        def area = width * height
        // create and return a Shape with the appropriate area
        new Shape(area: area)
    }
}

An instance of that class needs to be registered with the Spring application context:

// grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy
beans = {
    shapeEditor databinding.converters.StructuredShapeEditor
    // …
}

When the data binder binds to an instance of the Gadget class it will check to see if there are request parameters with names compressedShape and expandedShape which have a value of "struct" and if they do exist, that will trigger the use of the StructuredShapeEditor. The individual components of the structure need to have parameter names of the form propertyName_structuredElementName. In the case of the Gadget class above that would mean that the compressedShape request parameter should have a value of "struct" and the compressedShape_width and compressedShape_height parameters should have values which represent the width and the height of the compressed Shape. Similarly, the expandedShape request parameter should have a value of "struct" and the expandedShape_width and expandedShape_height parameters should have values which represent the width and the height of the expanded Shape.

// grails-app/controllers/demo/DemoController.groovy
class DemoController {
    def createGadget(Gadget gadget) {
        /*
        /demo/createGadget?expandedShape=struct&expandedShape_width=80&expandedShape_height=30
                          &compressedShape=struct&compressedShape_width=10&compressedShape_height=3
        */
        // with the request parameters shown above gadget.expandedShape.area would be 2400
        // and gadget.compressedShape.area would be 30
        // ...
    }
}

Typically the request parameters with "struct" as their value would be represented by hidden form fields.

Data Binding Event Listeners

The DataBindingListener interface provides a mechanism for listeners to be notified of data binding events. The interface looks like this:

package org.grails.databinding.events;
import org.grails.databinding.errors.BindingError;
public interface DataBindingListener {
    /**
     * @return true if the listener is interested in events for the specified type.
     */
    boolean supports(Class<?> clazz);
    /**
     * Called when data binding is about to start.
     * 
     * @param target The object data binding is being imposed upon
     * @param errors the Spring Errors instance (a org.springframework.validation.BindingResult)
     * @return true if data binding should continue
     */
    Boolean beforeBinding(Object target, Object errors);
    /**
     * Called when data binding is about to imposed on a property
     *
     * @param target The object data binding is being imposed upon
     * @param propertyName The name of the property being bound to
     * @param value The value of the property being bound
     * @param errors the Spring Errors instance (a org.springframework.validation.BindingResult)
     * @return true if data binding should continue, otherwise return false
     */
    Boolean beforeBinding(Object target, String propertyName, Object value, Object errors);
    /**
     * Called after data binding has been imposed on a property
     *
     * @param target The object data binding is being imposed upon
     * @param propertyName The name of the property that was bound to
     * @param errors the Spring Errors instance (a org.springframework.validation.BindingResult)
     */
    void afterBinding(Object target, String propertyName, Object errors);
    /**
     * Called after data binding has finished.
     *  
     * @param target The object data binding is being imposed upon
     * @param errors the Spring Errors instance (a org.springframework.validation.BindingResult)
     */
    void afterBinding(Object target, Object errors);
    /**
     * Called when an error occurs binding to a property
     * @param error encapsulates information about the binding error
     * @param errors the Spring Errors instance (a org.springframework.validation.BindingResult)
     * @see BindingError
     */
    void bindingError(BindingError error, Object errors);
}

Any bean in the Spring application context which implements that interface will automatically be registered with the data binder. The DataBindingListenerAdapter class implements the DataBindingListener interface and provides default implementations for all of the methods in the interface so this class is well suited for subclassing so your listener class only needs to provide implementations for the methods your listener is interested in.

The Grails data binder has limited support for the older BindEventListener style listeners. BindEventListener looks like this:

package org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.binding;
import org.springframework.beans.MutablePropertyValues;
import org.springframework.beans.TypeConverter;
public interface BindEventListener {
    /**
     * @param target The target to bind to
     * @param source The source of the binding, typically a Map
     * @param typeConverter The type converter to be used
     */
    void doBind(Object target, MutablePropertyValues source, TypeConverter typeConverter);
}

Support for BindEventListener is disabled by default. To enable support assign a value of true to the grails.databinding.enableSpringEventAdapter property in grails-app/conf/Config.groovy.

// grails-app/conf/Config.groovy
grails.databinding.enableSpringEventAdapter=true
...

With enableSpringEventAdapter set to true instances of BindEventListener which are in the Spring application context will automatically be registered with the data binder. Notice that the MutablePropertyValues and TypeConverter arguments to the doBind method in BindEventListener are Spring specific classes and are not relevant to the current data binder. The event adapter will pass null values for those arguments. The only real value passed into the doBind method will be the object being bound to. This limited support is provided for backward compatibility and will be useful for a subset of scenarios. Developers are encouraged to migrate their BindEventListener beans to the newer DataBindingListener model.

Using The Data Binder Directly

There are situations where an application may want to use the data binder directly. For example, to do binding in a Service on some arbitrary object which is not a domain class. The following will not work because the properties property is read only.

// src/groovy/bindingdemo/Widget.groovy
package bindingdemo
class Widget {
    String name
    Integer size
}

// grails-app/services/bindingdemo/WidgetService.groovy
package bindingdemo
class WidgetService {
    def updateWidget(Widget widget, Map data) {
        // this will throw an exception because
        // properties is read-only
        widget.properties = data
    }
}

An instance of the data binder is in the Spring application context with a bean name of grailsWebDataBinder. That bean implements the DataBinder interface. The following code demonstrates using the data binder directly.

// grails-app/services/bindingdmeo/WidgetService
package bindingdemo
import org.grails.databinding.SimpleMapDataBindingSource
class WidgetService {
    // this bean will be autowired into the service
    def grailsWebDataBinder
    def updateWidget(Widget widget, Map data) {
        grailsWebDataBinder.bind widget, data as SimpleMapDataBindingSource
    }
}

See the DataBinder documentation for more information about overloaded versions of the bind method.

Data Binding and Security Concerns

When batch updating properties from request parameters you need to be careful not to allow clients to bind malicious data to domain classes and be persisted in the database. You can limit what properties are bound to a given domain class using the subscript operator:

def p = Person.get(1)
p.properties['firstName','lastName'] = params

In this case only the firstName and lastName properties will be bound.

Another way to do this is is to use Command Objects as the target of data binding instead of domain classes. Alternatively there is also the flexible bindData method.

The bindData method allows the same data binding capability, but to arbitrary objects:

def p = new Person()
bindData(p, params)

The bindData method also lets you exclude certain parameters that you don't want updated:

def p = new Person()
bindData(p, params, [exclude: 'dateOfBirth'])

Or include only certain properties:

def p = new Person()
bindData(p, params, [include: ['firstName', 'lastName']])

Note that if an empty List is provided as a value for the include parameter then all fields will be subject to binding if they are not explicitly excluded.

7.1.7 XML and JSON Responses

Using the render method to output XML

Grails supports a few different ways to produce XML and JSON responses. The first is the render method.

The render method can be passed a block of code to do mark-up building in XML:

def list() {
    def results = Book.list()
    render(contentType: "text/xml") {
        books {
            for (b in results) {
                book(title: b.title)
            }
        }
    }
}

The result of this code would be something like:

<books>
    <book title="The Stand" />
    <book title="The Shining" />
</books>

Be careful to avoid naming conflicts when using mark-up building. For example this code would produce an error:

def list() {
    def books = Book.list()  // naming conflict here
    render(contentType: "text/xml") {
        books {
            for (b in results) {
                book(title: b.title)
            }
        }
    }
}

This is because there is local variable books which Groovy attempts to invoke as a method.

Using the render method to output JSON

The render method can also be used to output JSON:

def list() {
    def results = Book.list()
    render(contentType: "application/json") {
        books = array {
            for (b in results) {
                book title: b.title
            }
        }
    }
}

In this case the result would be something along the lines of:

[
    {"title":"The Stand"},
    {"title":"The Shining"}
]

The same dangers with naming conflicts described above for XML also apply to JSON building.

Automatic XML Marshalling

Grails also supports automatic marshalling of domain classes to XML using special converters.

To start off with, import the grails.converters package into your controller:

import grails.converters.*

Now you can use the following highly readable syntax to automatically convert domain classes to XML:

render Book.list() as XML

The resulting output would look something like the following::

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<list>
  <book id="1">
    <author>Stephen King</author>
    <title>The Stand</title>
  </book>
  <book id="2">
    <author>Stephen King</author>
    <title>The Shining</title>
  </book>
</list>

For more information on XML marshalling see the section on REST

Automatic JSON Marshalling

Grails also supports automatic marshalling to JSON using the same mechanism. Simply substitute XML with JSON:

render Book.list() as JSON

The resulting output would look something like the following:

[
    {"id":1,
     "class":"Book",
     "author":"Stephen King",
     "title":"The Stand"},
    {"id":2,
     "class":"Book",
     "author":"Stephen King",
     "releaseDate":new Date(1194127343161),
     "title":"The Shining"}
 ]

7.1.8 More on JSONBuilder

JSONBuilder and Grails versions

JSONBuilder behaves different depending on the version of Grails you use. For version below 1.2 the deprecated grails.web.JSONBuilder class is used. This section covers the usage of the Grails 1.2 JSONBuilder

For backwards compatibility the old JSONBuilder class is used with the render method for older applications; to use the newer/better JSONBuilder class set the following in Config.groovy:

grails.json.legacy.builder = false

Rendering Simple Objects

To render a simple JSON object just set properties within the context of the Closure:

render(contentType: "application/json") {
    hello = "world"
}

The above will produce the JSON:

{"hello":"world"}

Rendering JSON Arrays

To render a list of objects simple assign a list:

render(contentType: "application/json") {
    categories = ['a', 'b', 'c']
}

This will produce:

{"categories":["a","b","c"]}

You can also render lists of complex objects, for example:

render(contentType: "application/json") {
    categories = [ { a = "A" }, { b = "B" } ]
}

This will produce:

{"categories":[ {"a":"A"} , {"b":"B"}] }

Use the special element method to return a list as the root:

render(contentType: "application/json") {
    element 1
    element 2
    element 3
}

The above code produces:

[1,2,3]

Rendering Complex Objects

Rendering complex objects can be done with Closures. For example:

render(contentType: "application/json") {
    categories = ['a', 'b', 'c']
    title = "Hello JSON"
    information = {
        pages = 10
    }
}

The above will produce the JSON:

{"categories":["a","b","c"],"title":"Hello JSON","information":{"pages":10}}

Arrays of Complex Objects

As mentioned previously you can nest complex objects within arrays using Closures:

render(contentType: "application/json") {
    categories = [ { a = "A" }, { b = "B" } ]
}

You can use the array method to build them up dynamically:

def results = Book.list()
render(contentType: "application/json") {
    books = array {
        for (b in results) {
            book title: b.title
        }
    }
}

Direct JSONBuilder API Access

If you don't have access to the render method, but still want to produce JSON you can use the API directly:

def builder = new JSONBuilder()
def result = builder.build {
    categories = ['a', 'b', 'c']
    title = "Hello JSON"
    information = {
        pages = 10
    }
}
// prints the JSON text
println result.toString()
def sw = new StringWriter()
result.render sw

7.1.9 Uploading Files

Programmatic File Uploads

Grails supports file uploads using Spring's MultipartHttpServletRequest interface. The first step for file uploading is to create a multipart form like this:

Upload Form: <br />
    <g:uploadForm action="upload">
        <input type="file" name="myFile" />
        <input type="submit" />
    </g:uploadForm>

The uploadForm tag conveniently adds the enctype="multipart/form-data" attribute to the standard <g:form> tag.

There are then a number of ways to handle the file upload. One is to work with the Spring MultipartFile instance directly:

def upload() {
    def f = request.getFile('myFile')
    if (f.empty) {
        flash.message = 'file cannot be empty'
        render(view: 'uploadForm')
        return
    }
    f.transferTo(new File('/some/local/dir/myfile.txt'))
    response.sendError(200, 'Done')
}

This is convenient for doing transfers to other destinations and manipulating the file directly as you can obtain an InputStream and so on with the MultipartFile interface.

File Uploads through Data Binding