Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

After working with Grails a bit more after my original post, I've come across some rather annoying issues.

First up is an issue with the domain classes. I've noticed that if you have constraints defined which are invalid or whose value is incorrect, no error is reported. Oddly enough, what does occur is that the tables aren't created, and the class isn't initialized, so any subsequent attempt to use that class with result in a class definition not found exception. This is a poor choice of handling such a fundamental problem.

Next up was the gant scripts, which are presumably Grails' answer to Ruby on Rails rake tasks. The problem however, is that the grails environment isn't loaded and initialized for the gant script. This means that to do something as simple as accessing a domain class in a gant script requires massive amounts of coding:

import org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.*

includeTargets << grailsScript('Bootstrap')

target(main: "Bootstraps the database - assumes an empty database!") {
    depends(configureProxy, packageApp, classpath)

    bootstrap()

    def countryClass = grailsApp.getDomainClass('com.csam.remotecron.Country').getClazz()
    def template = new HibernateTemplate(appCtx.getBean("sessionFactory"))

    if (!countryClass.findById('CA')) {
        def canada = countryClass.newInstance()
        canada.id = 'CA'
        canada.englishName = 'Canada'
        canada.localName = 'Canada'
        template.save(canada)
    }
}

setDefaultTarget(main)

This, quite frankly, is absurd. Anyone who knows me knows that I am no fan or Ruby on Rails, but the rake tasks seem vastly superior to gant.

The problem is even more apparent if you try to use gant to prepopulate your database. It is common in very script systems to have "validation" data in the database, such as valid countries, primary administrative subdivisions, etc., etc. Ruby on Rails can use fixtures to do this, in either YAML or CSV format. There is a fixtures plugin for Grails, but it doesn't support CSV (for large datasets, this becomes a problem), and since the Grails environment isn't even initialized in gant, you cannot access the fixtures plugin, anyway.

Grails does have a "BootStrap" class, but this is really infeasible, as it runs every single time the application is deployed, which means (for example) that your entire country database must be re-created. If you are using referential integrity in your database, this is a real problem.

I've spent two days now trying to resolve this problem, with absolutely no solution in sight. Seems more like I will have to make a custom gant script which will at least initialize the GORM engine, and some kind of custom CSV reader.