In a previous post we learned that we can check a specific exception is not thrown in our specification with the notThrown method. If we are not interested in a specific exception, but just want to check no exception at all is thrown, we must use the noExceptionThrown method. This method return true if the called code doesn't throw an exception.

In the following example we invoke a method (cook) that can throw an exception. We want to test the case when no exception is thrown:

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Sometimes we want to include the classes from a plugin, like tasks, in our build class path without actually applying the plugin. Or we want to add the classes to the root project and actually apply the plugin in subprojects. We can achieve this with a buildScript block and add the plugin dependency to the classpath configuration. But we can also do this with the newer plugins configuration block. Inside the plugins block we define the id and the version of the plugin, and since Gradle 3.0 we can also use the apply method. We have to set the value false to include the plugin to the class path, but not apply it to the project.

In the following example we add the Asciidoctor plugin to our build file, but we only want to use the AsciidoctorTask task from this plugin.

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Since Gradle 3 the Gradle daemon is automatically used to run Gradle. This means Gradle will startup up faster after a first run. Gradle tries to re-use a daemon if it is available. We can check the status of the Gradle daemon processes with the new command-line option --status. We get the status results for the Gradle daemons with the same Gradle version that is used to view the status. So when we use Gradle 3.0 with the --status option we only see the 3.0 Gradle daemons.

The following example shows the sample output of running gradle with the --status option:

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The Software Development Kit Manager (SDKMAN!) is an awesome and very useful tool. We can use it to install and manage candidates like Groovy, Grails, Griffon and Gradle. If we want to know if a new version of an installed candidate is available we use the outdated command. SKDMAN! returns a list of candidates with newer versions and also displays the version we have and is available. If we specify the candidate we can see if for that specific candidate a newer version is available.

For example we can get the following results:

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Suppose we want to support partial JSON responses in our Ratpack application. The user must send a request parameter with a list of fields that need to be part of the response. In our code we must use the value of the request parameter and output only the given properties of an object. We implement this logic using a custom renderer in Ratpack. Inside the renderer we can get access to the request parameters of the original request.

In our example Ratpack application we have a Course class, which is a simple class withs some properties:

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We can use the environment variable SPRING_APPLICATION_JSON with a JSON value as configuration source for our Grails 3 application. The JSON value is parsed and merged with the configuration. Instead of the environment variable we can also use the Java system property spring.application.json.

Let's create a simple controller that reads the configuration property app.message:

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Ratpack has a lot of options to add configuration data to our application. We can use for example YAML and JSON files, properties, environment variables and Java system properties. Groovy has the ConfigSlurper class to parse Groovy script with configuration data. It even supports an environments block to set configuration value for a specific environment. If we want to support Groovy scripts as configuration definition we write a class that implements the ratpack.config.ConfigSource interface.

We create a new class ConfigSlurperConfigSource and implement the ConfigSource interface. We must implement the loadConfigData method in which we read the Groovy configuration and transform it to a ObjectNode so Ratpack can use it:

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We have many ways to provide configuration properties to a Spring (Boot) application. We can add our own custom configuration properties format. For example we can use Groovy's ConfigObject object to set configuration properties. We need to read a configuration file using ConfigSlurper and make it available as a property source for Spring. We need to implement two classes and add configuration file to support a Groovy configuration file in a Spring application.

First we need to write a class that extends the PropertySource in the package org.springframework.core.env. This class has methods to get property values based on a given key. There are already some subclasses for specific property sources. There is for example also a MapPropertySource class. We will extend that class for our implementation, because we can pass our flattened ConfigObject and rely on all existing functionality of the MapPropertySource class:

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To define configuration sources for our Ratpack application we have several options. We can set default properties, look at environment variables or Java system properties, load JSON or YAML formatted configuration files or implement our own configuration source. When something goes wrong using one of these methods we want to be able to handle that situation. For example if an optional configuration file is not found, we want to inform the user, but the application must still start. The default exception handling will throw the exception and the application is stopped. We want to customise this so we have more flexibility on how to handle exceptions.

We provide the configuration source in the serverConfig configuration block of our Ratpack application. We must add the onError method and provide an error handler implementation before we load any configuration source. This error handler will be passed to each configuration source and is execute when an exception occurs when the configuration source is invoked. The error handler implements the Action interface with the type Throwable. In our implementation we can for example check for the type of Throwable and show a correct status message to the user.

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Adding logging support to a class in Groovy is easy. We can choose to add SLF4J, Log4j, Log4j2, Apache Commons or Java Util Logging to our class. The default implementation of the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) transformation is to add a log field of the correct type. As category name the complete class name (including the package) is used. We can change the name of the field with the value attribute. To alter the category name we use the attribute category.

In the following example snippet we change the log field name to LOGGER and set a custom category name:

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In a previous post we learned how to use the toListString or toMapString methods. With these methods we create a String representation of a List or Map object. With a bit of Groovy code we can take such a String object and turn it into a List or Map again.

In the following code snippet we turn the String value [abc, 123, Groovy rocks!] to a List with three items:

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Groovy adds to Map objects the toMapString method. With this method we can have a String representation of our Map. We can specify an argument for the maximum width of the generated String. Groovy will make sure at least the key/value pairs are added as a pair, before adding three dots (...) if the maximum size is exceeded.

def course = [
    name: 'Groovy 101',
    teacher: 'mrhaki',
    location: 'The Netherlands']

assert course.toMapString(15) == '[name:Groovy 101, ...]'
assert course.toMapString(25) == '[name:Groovy 101, teacher:mrhaki, ...]'

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