Announcing the “Navigation” Plugin for Grails

Another plugin release… this time thanks to help from Andreas Arledal on the CSS front.

The Navigation Plugin gives you site navigation menus by convention. You just define a property in your controllers to determine what actions are shown and in what groups.

Full docs here

There is even a default styling of neutral “silver” buttons that you can use, or override the CSS easily, or use tags to render the items any way you like.

Part of the motivation for this is that if we can establish a “de facto” convention for navigation info, then plugins will be able to use it, to have functionality that just automatically “pops up” in your existing application.

Anyway now when you are prototyping your apps you can just add “static navigation = true” to your controllers, and add <nav:render/> to your GSP layout… and away you go!

Enjoy!

Functional testing in Grails just got a bit sexier

Ok so here’s the 1.0 release in the spirit of “don’t worry be crappy” (can’t use that phrase enough these days) of a new functional testing plugin for Grails.

Actually its far from crappy already.

I have developed this partly as part of my work for my generous client Historic Futures Ltd. who agreed to open source this.

I plan to continue improving and maintaining it personally. It’s surely a bit rough around the edges but the benefits should be pretty obvious to those who use it.

So what are you waiting for? Run:

grails install-plugin functional-test

See the documentation

…but in a nutshell it is HTTP testing with HtmlUnit under the hood but the rest is pure groovy smarts, leveraging standard JUnit.

Example:

import functionaltestplugin.*
class TwitterTests extends FunctionalTestCase {
  void testSearch() {
    get('http://www.twitter.com')

    click "Search"

    assertStatus 200
    assertContentContains "search"

    form('searchForm') {
      q = "#grails"
      click "Search"
    }

    assertStatus 200
    assertContentContains "#grails"
  }
}

What’s special about this?

1. Simplicity and “elasticity” by default = less fragile functional tests as a result
2. Simple compact DSL/methods to learn – it tries to “do the right thing”. Let’s face it writing tests is really boring.
3. Ability to get/post directly without browsing to a page first. eg REST testing
4. No .properties configs

…and one more thing URL stacktrace. When a test fails the report includes a stack of the URLs at the point of failure. The xxx-out.txt file contains request parameters+headers, content received etc. This feature will be expanded in future to allow a proper request/response chain autopsy.

Caveats – things I definitely want to sort out pronto:

• currently test output is a bit ropey, I would like to do much nicer stuff with custom output xml and rendering
• no simple way to set post body
• no simple way to parse out json/xml responses yet

All this and more will come, with your support! Contribs also welcome!

ENJOY!

Grails mail plugin 0.4 released, as well as the first “Grails Rocks” screencast

I released version 0.4 of the grails-mail plugin in the Grails plugin repo the other day, but have not posted about it as I’ve been busy working on-site. I’ve also been putting together a screencast that shows how to use the plugin in the most basic scenario and also render content from GSPs from within services.

To install the plugin, which adds support for rendering the mail body from a GSP from within a controller, service or job, run: grails install-plugin mail

Full docs for the mail plugin are here.

To view the “Using the Grails mail plugin” screencast, click on the thumbnail or go to the fledgling “Grails Rocks” page.

This is the first Grails Rocks screencast, but I hope to do many more. The next one is already planned, for the forthcoming release of the Email Confirmation plugin – which was dependent on this mail plugin 0.4 release.