Archive: February 2014

Grails Goodness: Run Forked Tests in IntelliJ IDEA

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Hubert Klein Ikkink

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.

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Grails Goodness: Customize Root Element Name Collections for XML Marshalling

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Hubert Klein Ikkink

When we convert a List or Set to XML using the Grails XML marshalling support the name of the root element is either <list> or <set>. We can change this name by extending the org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.converters.marshaller.xml.CollectionMarshaller. We must override the method supports() to denote the type of collection we want to customize the root element name for. And we must override the method getElementName() which returns the actual name of the root element for the List or Set.

Let's first see the default output of a collection of Book domain classes. In a controller we have the following code:

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Grails Goodness: Cleaning Up

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Hubert Klein Ikkink

When we use for example the compile or war command Grails will create files and stores them by default in the project's working directory. The location of the project working directory can be customized in our grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy configuration file. We remove the generated files with the Grails clean command. This command will remove all compiled class files, the WAR file, cached scripts and test reports. But this doesn't remove all files in the project working directory. For example plugins or a temporary web.xml file, which are stored in the project working directory are not removed. We must use the clean-all command to also remove those files from the project working directory completely.

Let's take a look at the default settings in our grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy configuration file when we create a new Grails application:

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