15.4 Providing Basic Artefacts - Reference Documentation
Authors: Graeme Rocher, Peter Ledbrook, Marc Palmer, Jeff Brown, Luke Daley, Burt Beckwith, Lari Hotari
Version: 2.3.8
15.4 Providing Basic Artefacts
Adding a new Script
A plugin can add a new script simply by providing the relevant Gant script in its scripts directory:+ MyPlugin.groovy + scripts <-- additional scripts here + grails-app + controllers + services + etc. + lib
Adding a new grails-app artifact (Controller, Tag Library, Service, etc.)
A plugin can add new artifacts by creating the relevant file within thegrails-app
tree. Note that the plugin is loaded from where it is installed and not copied into the main application tree.+ ExamplePlugin.groovy + scripts + grails-app + controllers <-- additional controllers here + services <-- additional services here + etc. <-- additional XXX here + lib
Providing Views, Templates and View resolution
When a plugin provides a controller it may also provide default views to be rendered. This is an excellent way to modularize your application through plugins. Grails' view resolution mechanism will first look for the view in the application it is installed into and if that fails will attempt to look for the view within the plugin. This means that you can override views provided by a plugin by creating corresponding GSPs in the application'sgrails-app/views
directory.For example, consider a controller called BookController
that's provided by an 'amazon' plugin. If the action being executed is list
, Grails will first look for a view called grails-app/views/book/list.gsp
then if that fails it will look for the same view relative to the plugin.However if the view uses templates that are also provided by the plugin then the following syntax may be necessary:<g:render template="fooTemplate" plugin="amazon"/>
plugin
attribute, which contains the name of the plugin where the template resides. If this is not specified then Grails will look for the template relative to the application.Excluded Artefacts
By default Grails excludes the following files during the packaging process:grails-app/conf/BootStrap.groovy
grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy
(although it is used to generatedependencies.groovy
)grails-app/conf/Config.groovy
grails-app/conf/DataSource.groovy
(and any other*DataSource.groovy
)grails-app/conf/UrlMappings.groovy
grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy
- Everything within
/web-app/WEB-INF
- Everything within
/web-app/plugins/**
- Everything within
/test/**
- SCM management files within
**/.svn/**
and**/CVS/**
web-app/WEB-INF
directory it is recommended that you modify the plugin's scripts/_Install.groovy
Gant script to install these artefacts into the target project's directory tree.In addition, the default UrlMappings.groovy
file is excluded to avoid naming conflicts, however you are free to add a UrlMappings definition under a different name which will be included. For example a file called grails-app/conf/BlogUrlMappings.groovy
is fine.The list of excludes is extensible with the pluginExcludes
property:// resources that are excluded from plugin packaging
def pluginExcludes = [
"grails-app/views/error.gsp"
]