In the previous blog post about Geb, we have been introduced to the Geb Framework. In this blogpost we will be introduced to Pages and Modules. A Page represents a specific page from a web application. A module represent a part of the page; for example a sign-up form, a menu bar or contact form. Pages and Modules are very useful since they are very easy to reuse and therefore useful to create more advanced UI tests. In this blogpost we are going to use Pages and Modules to test the contact form of the JDriven website. We will verify that a success message will appear if we submit a valid form. Pages have a url attribute which represent the address to the page. To get the complete url, Geb requires a baseUrl which we can define in the GebConfig.groovy
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With Grails 3 we also get Spring Boot Actuator. We can use Spring Boot Actuator to add some production-ready features for monitoring and managing our Grails application. One of the features is the addition of some endpoints with information about our application. By default we already have a /health endpoint when we start a Grails (3+) application. It gives back a JSON response with status _UP_. Let's expand this endpoint and add a disk space, database and url health check indicator.
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We can let Grails log some extra information when the application starts. Like the process ID (PID) of the application and on which machine the application starts. And the time needed to start the application. The GrailsApp class has a property logStartupInfo which is true by default. If the property is true than some extra lines are logged at INFO and DEBUG level of the logger of our Application class.
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Since Grails 3 we can borrow a lot of the Spring Boot features in our applications. If we look in our Application.groovy file that is created when we create a new Grails application we see the class GrailsApp. This class extends SpringApplication so we can use all the methods and properties of SpringApplication in our Grails application. Spring Boot and Grails comes with the class ApplicationPidFileWriter in the package org.springframework.boot.actuate.system. This class saves the application PID (Process ID) in a file application.pid when the application starts.
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When we want to explain in our documentation which keys a user must press to get to a function we can use the keyboard macro in Asciidoctor. The macro will output the key nicely formatted as a real key on the keyboard. The syntax of the macro is kbd:[key]. To get the desired output we must set the document attribute experimental otherwise the macro is not used.
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In Scala, filtering and processing collections is easy and elegant. There are many filtermethods available, but the most used will probably the basic filter method. Here's a code example of some filtering on my (ex)camera collection. The filter method will not only work on Lists, but on any Scala collection.
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In Gradle we can configure how duplicate files should be handled by the Copy task. Actually we can configure how duplicate files are handled by any task that implements the CopySpec interface. For example archive tasks also implements this interface. We must use the setDuplicatesStrategy method to configure how Gradle behaves. The parameter is a value of the enumeration DuplicatesStrategy. We can use the values from the enum class or use String values, which are automatically converted to enum DuplicatesStrategy values.
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The nice thing about Gradle is that we can use Java libraries in our build script. This way we can add extra functionality to our build script in an easy way. We must use the classpath dependency configuration for our build script to include the library. For example we can include the library Grgit, which provides an easy way to interact with Git from Java or Groovy code. This library is also the basis for the Gradle Git plugin.
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Scala has no default way to deal with dates and times. We have a few options. java.util.Date and java.util.Calendar These come included with java, so they may do if you don't need to do much and don't want to add any dependencies. But they're horrible and it's best not to use them. Joda-Time http://www.joda.org/joda-time/ The de facto standard date and time library for Java. nscala-time https://github.com/nscala-time/nscala-time A thin scala layer around Joda-Time. This adds some implicit conversions to make it easier to use, like the + and < operators.
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When we convert our Asciidoctor markup to HTML we automatically get a head and footer element. We can add custom content to the HTML head element and to the HTML div with id footer. We must set a document attribute and create the files that contain the HTML that needs to be added to the head or footer. We have three different document attributes we can set to include the custom content files:
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For Java or Groovy projects we can use the application plugin in Gradle to run and package our application. The plugin adds for example the startScripts task which creates OS specific scripts to run the project as a JVM application. This task is then used again by the installDist that installs the application, and distZip and distTar tasks that create a distributable archive of the application. The startScripts tasks has the properties unixScript and windowsScript that are the actual OS specific script files to run the application. We can use these properties to change the contents of the files.
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Grails 3 is based on Spring Boot. This means we can use a lot of the stuff that is available in Spring Boot now in our Grails application. If we look at the logging of a plain Spring Boot application we notice the logging has colors by default if our console supports ANSI. We can also configure our Grails logging so that we get colors.
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