Wednesday, August 25, 2010

how to ask user for confirmation before executing remoteLink

before:"if(!confirm('Are you sure?')) return false"

The trick is not to return "true". Credits go to this jira.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

short reminder for stupid me

If the tag does not work, it is most probably because I forgot to add the braces to the variable:

 
never works!

 
usually does work!

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

grails and SVN

I added my grails projects to a SVN repository, in order to be able to work someplace else. When I tried to check my projects out however, they did not run.

I included .project and .classpath files as I already learned that they are needed for eclipse to recognize them as grails projects.

Problem: When I ran run-app I got error messages complaining that plugins could not be resolved (locally). Also the plugin manager in STS did not list any plugins. Nothing worked.

What I missed however was that you have to run grails upgrade to reinstantiate other missing files. Afterwards plugins are resolved correctly and downloaded from the internet. This solution was found here.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

preventing grails-ui tooltip from disappearing

Today I tried to prevent the grails-ui tooltip from disappearing after 5 seconds when the mouse is not moved. From the YUI doc I knew I had to alter a parameter 'autodismissdelay', but I haven't found a way to pass this parameter with the taglib. Unfortunately the only way I succeeded was to alter the ToolTip.js in grails-ui-1.2-SNAPSHOT\web-app\js\grailsui where I changed the value from 5000 to -1.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

making export plugin work with filterpane

The export plugin and the filterpane plugin for themselves work like a charm. If you try to export your filtered list however, you run into problems. The root of this problem has been recognized during an earlier discussion on the mailing list.

The problem: You have to extend the filter action to deal with the export. Therefore you have to apply the filterService.filter method with the same filter params as when you applied the actual filter.

The workaround (not a perfect solution): To solve this problem I save the filter params in the session. When export is applied on the filter action the filter params are retrieved from the session. That works well although I'm not very happy with storing so much information in the session permanently.

The Code:

Here I have modified the example from the plugin page. The export-part of the list action is extracted and gets its own export closure, which can then be used by the filter action as well. I also do not explicitly name the parameters as I am using this code in a scaffolded controller. Therefore a list is fetched of all properties, excluded those that are not really representative.

def export = {attrs ->
  
  def response = attrs.response
  println attrs.exportList
  
  def excluded = grails.persistence.Event.allEvents.toList() + ["mapping", "lastModifierId", "hasMany", "class", "belongsTo", "constraints", "searchable", "attached", "errors", "metaClass", "log", "object", "version", "beforeInsert", "beforeUpdate", "mappedBy", "springSecurityService", "type", "typeLabel"]
  List fields = ${className}.newInstance().properties.keySet().toList().findAll { !excluded.contains(it) && !isId(it)}

  response.contentType = org.codehaus.groovy.grails.commons.ConfigurationHolder.config.grails.mime.types[attrs.format]
  response.setHeader("Content-disposition", "attachment; filename=${className}.\${attrs.extension}")
  
  exportService.export(attrs.format, response.outputStream, attrs.exportList, fields, [:], [:], [:])
 }
 
 def isId(def label)
 {
  label.reverse().startsWith("dI")
 }

 def filter = {  
  if(!params.max) params.max = 10
  println "out:" +params
  if(params?.format && params.format != "html" && session.filterParams)
  {
   def exportList = filterService.filter( session.filterParams, ${className} )
   println "list:" + exportList
   export(response: response, extension: params.extension, format: params.format, exportList: exportList)
  }
  
  session.filterParams = params
  
  render( view:'list',
   model:[ ${propertyName}List: filterService.filter( params, ${className} ),
   ${propertyName}Total: filterService.count( params, ${className} ),
   filterParams: com.zeddware.grails.plugins.filterpane.FilterUtils.extractFilterParams(params),
   params:params ] )
 }

EDIT: Steve made me aware that it is easy to extract the necessary parameters with a helper method. One should therefore rather modify the export taglib to pass the correct parameters to the filter action. Also see Steve's comment below.

EDIT: Please forget about most of the crazy stuff I have done here :-) You can pass the filterParams with the export tag like this:


Thursday, July 15, 2010

just some notes about working with scaffolding code

When I modify scaffolding templates I always wonder how to obtain different properties like e.g. the class name or the id of the current instance. A general remark: What confused me most in the beginning was notation like \${${...}}. What you have to know is that \$ is escaped and is therefore what you can normally achieve in GSPs with a $. The unescaped $ within that clause is for the template. When actual code is generated from the template those $ are resolved immediately. You can therefore only use properties that are kown at this stage. Here are a few examples.

\${${className}}
This resolves the long version of the current class name

You often see that properties of an instance are iterated. The variable name of a property is then 'p':

${p.name}
This is the name of the property as it is used in the current instance. You need this value if you want to access that property in a controller (similar to this: domainClassInstance."${params.propertyName}").

${p.referencedDomainClass?.propertyName}
This one gives you the propertyName of the referenced domain class, thus the domain class of the property p. The propertyName is equal to the controller name if you stick to the convention.

${p.referencedDomainClass?.fullName}
Sometimes you need to have the full class name with the whole package notation. This can be useful for domain class instantiation (see my last post).

${p.referencedDomainClass?.shortName}
This is the actual class name omitting the package notation.

how to get a domain class instance from a class string (e.g. via params)

I had the problem that I could pass the class name from my gsp to my controller, but I didn't know how to work with that being a String. Luckily I stumpled about the solution in a code example somewhere on the web:

def grailsApplication
grailsApplication.getDomainClass(params.className).newInstance()