NOTE: This blog post is originally written for AngularJS 1.2.x; in 1.3.x the "input not showing invalid model values" has been fixed.
Although 1.3.x still has the "inconsistencies in how AngularJS parses data entry" the solution from this blog post isn't working for 1.3.x but I will try to find a fix for this within the next few weeks.

A while ago I noticed that AngularJS doesn't show invalid model values bound to an <input/> There is also an open bug report about this: issue #1412 - input not showing invalid model values The bug can be easily illustrated through the following example:

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In a previous blog post we learned how we can unit test a template or view independently. But what if we want to unit test a controller that uses the render() method and a template with the template key instead of a view? Normally the view and model are stored in the modelAndView property of the response. We can even use shortcuts in our test code like view and model to check the result. But a render() method invocation with a template key will simply execute the template (also in test code) and the result is put in the response. With the text property of the response we can check the result.

In the following sample controller we use the header template and pass a username model property to render output.

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Since Grails 2 we can render binary output with the render() method and the file attribute. The file attribute can be assigned a byte[], File, InputStream or String value. Grails will try to determine the content type for files, but we can also use the contentType attribute to set the content type.

In the following controller we find an image in our application using grailsResourceLocator. Then we use the render() method and the file and contenType attributes to render the image in a browser:

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Grails uses Spring and we can piggyback on the Spring support for resource loading to find for examples files in the classpath of our application. We can use the Spring org.springframework.core.io.Resource or org.springframework.core.io.ResourceLoader interface to find resources in our application.

And since Grails 2.0 we can also use the org.codehaus.groovy.grails.core.io.ResourceLocator interface. In our code we can use the grailsResourceLocator service which implements the ResourceLocator interface. We must inject the grailsResourceLocator service into our code and we use the method findResourceForURI(String) to find a resource. The advantage of the grailsResourceLocator service is that it knows about a Grails application. For example resources in plugins can also be accessed.

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Spock has some great features to write specifications or tests that are short and compact. One of them is the old() method. The old() method can only be used in a then: block. With this method we get the value a statement had before the when: block is executed.

Let's see this with a simple example. In the following specification we create a StringBuilder with an initial value. In the then: block we use the same initial value for the assertion:

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There is really no excuse to not write unit tests in Grails. The support for writing tests is excellent, also for testing code that has to deal with the locale set in a user's request. For example we could have a controller or taglib that needs to access the locale. In a unit test we can invoke the addPreferredLocale() method on the mocked request object and assign a locale. The code under test uses the custom locale we set via this method.

In the following controller we create a NumberFormat object based on the locale in the request.

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Grails adds a couple of methods and properties to our controller classes automatically. One of the methods is the header() method. With this method we can set a response header with a name and value. The methods accepts two arguments: the first argument is the header name and the second argument is the header value.

In the following controller we invoke the header() method to set the header X-Powered-By with the Grails and Groovy version.

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NOTE: this blog post was written for version 0.8 of the Karma test runner. An updated blog post for the new Karma 0.10 can be found here.

For my current project we are using Maven to build our AngularJS application. Furthermore we use Sonar (recently renamed to SonarCube) to monitor our code standards / best practices and unit test coverage. In this blog post we describe how to integrate the Karma (Testacular) test runner with Maven and how to add your AngularJS (or any JavaScript) application to SonarQube.

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When we want to clone an object there are several ways to do this For instance we can implement Clonable, which makes it possible to duplicate an object. We also can create a new object manually by calling each setter or use a parameterised constructor. In case we want to clone a Hibernate object, there is an extra option available which is more elegant: the Hibernate3BeanReplicator. The Hibernate3BeanReplicator is provided by Beanlib (http://beanlib.sourceforge.net/) and it supports deep clones, so we can also clone related one-to-one objects easily. For example we want to clone the Student object, including all child (one-to-one) objects.

Student student = studentDao.getStudentById(1);

HibernateBeanReplicator replicator = new Hibernate3BeanReplicator();
Student studentCopy = replicator.deepCopy(student);

studentCopy.setId(null);
studentCopy.getRelatedObject().setId(null);

studentDao.save(studentCopy);

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Say you have a arbitrary class under test, which is dependent on a class DataProcessor which has a method with the following signature:

 String processData(String data, MultivaluedMap  params, Token token)

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