The @ToString AST transformation has several parameters we can define to customize the generated code for the toString method. We have already seen some of the parameters in an earlier blog post, but in new Groovy releases some extra parameters were added.
For example we can leave out the package name of the class with the parameter includePackage. If we set the value to false the package name is not included:
We can extend the integrate-with command in Grails to generate files for a custom IDE or build system. We must add a _Events.groovy file to our Grails projects and then write an implementation for the eventIntegrateWithStart event. Inside the event we must define a new closure with our code to generate files. The name of the closure must have the following pattern: binding.integrate_CustomIdentifier_. The value for CustomIdentifier can be used as an argument for the integrate-with command.
Suppose we want to extend integrate-with to generate a simple Sublime Text project file. First we create a template Sublime Text project file where we define folders for a Grails application. We create the folder src/ide-support/sublimetext and add the file grailsProject.sublimetext-project with the following contents:
We can use the integrateWith command with Grails to generate for example IDE project files and build system files. We specify via an extra argument the type of files to be generated. We can use this command also to create a .gitignore file with some default settings for files to be ignored in Grails projects.
$ grails integrate-with --git
The database plugin in IntelliJ IDEA is a useful tool to work with data in databases. As long as we got a JDBC driver to connect to the database we can configure a data source. And then we can run queries, inspect the contents of tables and change data with the database tool window. It is not uncommon to have multiple data sources, for example development and test environment databases, which will have the same tables. When we open the tables or run queries we don't have a visual feedback to see to which data source such a table belongs. To have a visual feedback we can colorize our data source. This means we assign a color to a data source and when we open a table from that data source the tab color in the editor window will have a different color than other tabs or the background color of the data source objects have a color.
To add a color to a data source we must open the database tool window and right click on a data source. We select the option Color Settings... from the popup window:
In a previous post we learned about the Writable interface and how the GString implementation implements this interface. In Groovy we can also use a closure as an implementation of the Writable interface. The Closure class has the method asWritable() that will return a version of the closure with an implementation of the writeTo() method. The Writer object that is used as an argument for the writeTo() method will be passed as argument to the closure. The asWritable() method also adds a toString() implementation for the closure to return the result of a closure as a String.
In the following code we write a sample make() method. The make() method return a Writable closure. The closure is only executed when the writeTo() or toString() method is invoked.
The Groovy API has the interface Writable. Classes that implement this interface are capable of writing their selves to a java.io.Writer object. The interface has one method writeTo() where the code is that writes the contents to a given Writer instance. Most implementations will also use the implementation of the writeTo() method in their toString() implementation.
The GString implementation in Groovy also implements the Writable interface. This means we can redirect the GString contents to some Writer instance if we want to. In the following code we use a FileWriter to write the contents of a GString to a file:
To convert a byte[] array to a String we can simply use the new String(byte[]) constructor. But if the array contains non-printable bytes we don't get a good representation. In Groovy we can use the method encodeHex() to transform a byte[] array to a hex String value. The byte elements are converted to their hexadecimal equivalents.
final byte[] printable = [109, 114, 104, 97, 107, 105]
// array with non-printable bytes 6, 27 (ACK, ESC)
final byte[] nonprintable = [109, 114, 6, 27, 104, 97, 107, 105]
assert new String(printable) == 'mrhaki'
assert new String(nonprintable) != 'mr haki'
// encodeHex() returns a Writable
final Writable printableHex = printable.encodeHex()
assert printableHex.toString() == '6d7268616b69'
final nonprintableHex = nonprintable.encodeHex().toString()
assert nonprintableHex == '6d72061b68616b69'
// Convert back
assert nonprintableHex.decodeHex() == nonprintable
In a previous post we learned how we can use Hibernate native SQL queries in our Grails application. We can also execute custom SQL with Groovy SQL. We must create a new instance of groovy.sql.Sql in our code to execute SQL code. The easiest way is to use a javax.sql.DataSource as a constructor argument for the groovy.sql.Sql class. In a Grails application context we already have a DataSource and we can use it to inject it into our code. We must use the name dataSource to reference the default datasource in a Grails application.
In the following sample we invoke a custom query (for Firebird) using Groovy SQL. Notice we define a property dataSource in the Grails service PersonService and Grails will automatically inject a DataSource instance.
Sometimes we want to use Hibernate native SQL in our code. For example we might need to invoke a selectable stored procedure, we cannot invoke in another way. To invoke a native SQL query we use the method createSQLQuery() which is available from the Hibernate session object. In our Grails code we must then first get access to the current Hibernate session. Luckily we only have to inject the sessionFactory bean in our Grails service or controller. To get the current session we invoke the getCurrentSession() method and we are ready to execute a native SQL query. The query itself is defined as a String value and we can use placeholders for variables, just like with other Hibernate queries.
In the following sample we create a new Grails service and use a Hibernate native SQL query to execute a selectable stored procedure with the name organisation_breadcrumbs. This stored procedure takes one argument startId and will return a list of results with an id, name and level column.
In our Grails applications we might have fields that need the same combination of constraints. For example we want all email fields in our application to have a maximum size of 256 characters and must apply to the email constraint. If we have different classes with an email field, like domain classes and command objects, we might end of duplicating the constraints for this field. But in Grails we can combine multiple constraints for a field into a single constraint with a new name. We do this in grails-app/conf/Config.groovy where we add the configuration property grails.gorm.default.constraints. Here we can define global constraints with can be used in our Grails application.
Let's add a custom email constraint in our application:
IntelliJ IDEA 13 added the Terminal tool window to the IDE. We can open a terminal window with Tools | Open Terminal.... To change the font of the terminal we must open the preferences and select IDE Settings | Editor | Colors & Fonts | Console Font. Here we can choose a font and change the font size:
In the latest Grails releases we can execute our tests in so-called forked mode. This means a separate JVM is started with an isolated classpath from the Grails build system. When we want to run our tests in forked mode from within IntelliJ IDEA we get the following error: Error running forked test-app: Could not load grails build listener class (Use --stacktrace to see the full trace). To make running tests in forked mode work with IntelliJ IDEA we must add one of the IntelliJ IDEA supplied JAR files to the Grails classpath.
We need to search for the file grails-rt.jar in the directory where we installed IntelliJ IDEA. For example on Mac OSX this would be Applications/IntelliJ IDEA 13.app/plugins/Grails/lib/grails-rt.jar. We need to copy this file to the lib directory of our Grails project. On *nix systems we can actually define a soft link to this location in the lib directory. For example with the following command $ ln -s /Applications/IntelliJ\ IDEA\ 13.app/plugins/Grails/lib/grails-rt.jar lib/intellij-grails-rt.jar.
