I have been working with Groovy on Grails for a while as a front-end developer, and I hit snags from time to time, getting it to behave as I would like. Here is a list of some of the things that I am sick of researching every time I work on a new project:
I hate that when I drop in the meta tag for applying a layout (<meta name="layout" content="main" />) it leaves that useless meta tag in the head of the document. So, I looked around, and learned that dropping the following Grails tag at the very beginning of the document will apply the desired layout without cluttering up your markup:
<g:applyLayout name="main" />
Additionally, adding the following directive to the config.groovy file will remove the need for using that directive in cases where you are using the main template:
grails.sitemesh.default.layout = 'layoutName'
W00T!
Next,
- Use either of the following two options to display a date:
<g:formatDate format="yyyy"/>${new Date().format("yyyy")}
- Use either of the following two to create a link (relative to the application’s root):
In the cases below, link creates a full anchor (<a>) tag/element, whilc createLink only returns/prints the URL/href/src.<g:link uri="/blah/" class="css-class">Link</g:link>${link(uri:'/blah/')}<a href="${createLink(uri:'/blah/')}" class="css-class">Link</a><a href="${link(uri:'/blah/')}" class="css-class">Link</a>createLinkis used to create a URL.<g:createLink/>is the markup-flavored way to do the same:${createLink(controller:'application',action:'archive',id:application.id,params:[key1:'value1',key2:'value2'])}and<g:createLink controller="application" action="archive" id="${application.id}" params="[key1: 'value1', key2: 'value2']" />would both resolve to something like this:/hello/world/1?key1=value1&key2=value2linkand<g:link/>are correlary, and are used for building out an entire anchor tag (standard hyperlink).- RAW –
${raw('test')}– you get the idea! – h/t Tony <g:message code="page.header.${params.searchType}"></g:message>==${message(code:'page.header.'+params.searchType)}${grailsApplication.config.grails.serverBase + request.forwardURI}== the full URL of the page that you are on.
Use
You can nest layouts using that same g:applyLayout tag to a sub-template (e.g. <g:applyLayout name="global"/>).
If you want to place in the contents of the inheriting view/page properly within the title, wrap g:layoutTitle in the title tag in the head (e.g. <title><g:layoutTitle/></title>). Then wrap the actual title in a title tag on the inheriting view (e.g. <title>actual title</title>).
Similarly, if you want to place the contents of the head of the document in the head of the template, use the g:layoutHead tag thus: <g:layoutHead/>
If you would like to include blocks of JavaScript below late loading JavaScript calls (e.g. <script src="./some-script.js"></script>, etc.) at the bottom of the body of a page, add the following to a template file (e.g. main.gsp.
<g:pageProperty name="page.endjs" />
Then add your code block (whether a referential script tag or a block of code), add it to the appropriate view (.gsp) file thus:
<content tag="endjs">
<script>
$(document).ready(function() {
blah();
});
</script>
</content>
Find more related help over on the terminal crib sheet.