Some notes about the Windows installer for Grails

This isn’t really a problem, but I don’t think it’s documented anywhere, so I thought I’d record it here.

(And by the way, if your reaction to my Windows-based comments is going to be “why not use something other than Windows,” my answer is (1) at least one of my machines is always running Windows, but more importantly (2) my clients overwhelmingly use Windows in their training rooms, so I can’t get away from it even if I wanted to.)

Like Groovy, the Grails downloads page includes a special installer for Windows. You don’t have to use it — it’s still fine to just download the zip file, unpack it, set the GRAILS_HOME variable and go on, but if you do decide to use the Windows installer you should know that a few details have changed.

First of all, when the installer runs, it creates a different directory structure than that found in the regular zip file. The installer creates a structure like:

c:\grails-1.0.2\
bin\
gbin\
grails\
… other files ..

which means the GRAILS_HOME variable needs to point to “c:\grails-1.0.2\grails” rather than “c:\grails-1.0.2” as the User Guide says. That also means that if you want to put Grails in your path for all command prompts, you need the “bin” directory under “grails”, not the one under “grails-1.0.2”. Personally, I assigned GRAILS_HOME to “c:\grails-1.0.2\grails” and put “%GRAILS_HOME%\bin” in my path, just be sure.

This also comes up if you’re using the JetGroovy plug-in for IntelliJ IDEA. The plug-in requires you to specify where the root of the Grails distribution is, which again is the “grails” subdirectory.

In principle, a lot of this isn’t even necessary. The installer creates a desktop shortcut called “Grails Environment” which is a configured command prompt. When I fire it up on my machine and check the path, I see that the directories

c:\jdk1.6.0\bin
C:\GRAILS~1.2\grails\ant\bin
C:\GRAILS~1.2\grails\bin
C:\GRAILS~1.2\GRAILS\..\gbin

have all been prepended (i.e., they appear at the beginning, rather than the end) to my path. The first one is very likely just my “%JAVA_HOME%\bin”, which was already in there, but again that’s not really a problem.

The other interesting characteristic about the “Grails Environment” window is that inside it, you don’t need to type the word “grails” in front of each command. You can just type “create-domain-class myclass” or whatever, and it works automatically. The Grails command line interface is already running.

For the create-* commands to work correctly, of course, you need to be in the root of your Grails application. The environment prompt looks like this:

[C:\grails-1.0.2]
grails:\>

at it starts, which is in the root of the Grails distribution. I needed to change directories to my own application, so after a couple of “cd”s I wound up with

[C:\grails_apps\myapp]
grails:\>

The environment supports all the normal DOS commands, like “dir” or “cd”.

Incidentally, there’s no problem firing up more than one instance of the “Grails Environment”. It creates a separate command window for each case.

There has also been a change to the documentation. In earlier versions, the User Guide (an excellent resource, getting better all the time) was stored in HTML form, and was basically a copy of the documentation found here. Now, using the installer, the documentation has been bundled inside a Windows help file, which has the file extension *.chm.

Finally, the installer adds entries under “Start->All Programs->Grails 1.0.2”. Those entries are:

API Documentation (a link to the included JavaDocs for Grails)
Grails Environment (discussed above)
Grails References (a link to the Windows help file)
Grails Web site (a link to http:\\grails.org)
Uninstall Grails 1.0.2 (which does what it says)

As with most things in Grails, it’s very forgiving. You can use it, or not. If you prefer the older (or should I say, “classic”?) style, just download the zipped distribution and go from there. If you want the installer to do that extra work for you, that’s fine too. I think, though, that including a README file of some kind containing all this information might be helpful.

Still, I tend to like these sorts of installers. I spend more time running training classes than I do on my own systems doing development, so set-up is an ongoing challenge for me. I’m tempted to tell the person setting up a training room to just download and run the Windows installer and they’re done. I may do that for my upcoming Grails class, but I haven’t quite decided yet.

By the way, Groovy also comes with a Windows installer. I really like that one. It creates the same directory structure that the zip file contains, but it also offers to create a GROOVY_HOME variable and add its “bin” directory to either your path or the system path, installs a native environment (whatever that is, but it sounded good), and downloads and installs optional components like Scriptom and the Graphics environment. Using that one is a no-brainer for me, though I’ve found it to be a bit slow.

I hope this helps someone. The creator of the installer is Chanwit Kaewkasi, who is active on the Grails users list. He was kind enough to answer my questions about it there.

Integration tests of controllers in Grails

The documentation on doing integration tests of controllers is a bit thin. I had to ask on the mailing list about how to do some of the basics, so I thought I’d make a record of the results here.

First of all, Grails distinguishes between unit tests and integration tests, in that integration tests involve functionality from the rest of the Grails environment. Running an integration test is rather like using the Grails console. All the dynamic finders are available, as well as any other properties injected by Grails. In a unit test, all of those items would have to be mocked somehow in order to isolate the class under test.

Chapter 6 of DGG discusses testing. The unit testing section is still pretty good, and there’s a section on using Mocks and Stubs which is interesting but feels a bit dated. I’m really looking forward to seeing the next edition of the book. Rumor has it that that’s already in the works.

The cool part is that according to the wiki, when you run “grails test-app”, Grails automatically injects a MockHttpServletRequest, MockHttpServletResponse, and a MockHttpSession from Spring into each integration test. The details of those classes are found in the API documentation for Spring in the org.springframework.mock.web package.

The example given in the wiki page referenced above shows what to do if controller methods end with either a render or a redirect. It turns out that the test case can use the mocked response property to check the resulting value. The sample there looks like

class FooController {
    def text = { render "bar" }

    def someRedirect = { redirect(action:"bar") }
}

so that the test case is

class FooControllerTests extends GroovyTestCase {
    void testText() {
        def fc = new FooController()
        fc.text()
        assertEquals "bar", fc.response.contentAsString
    }

    void testSomeRedirect() {
        def fc = new FooController()
        fc.someRedirect
        assertEquals "/foo/bar", fc.response.redirectedUrl
    }
}

Those are both interesting, of course, and it’s good that they point to the getContentAsString() and getRedirectedUrl() methods in the MockHttpServletResponse classes. My problem is that since both controller methods are invoked without input parameters, neither example shows how to set them.

Here’s the situation I was trying to test, reduced to trivial form. I have a Message class:

class Message {
    String sender
    String msg
}

The generated controller has (among other things) a create action that looks like

class MessageController {
    // ... lots of other actions ...
    def create = {
        def message = new Message()
        message.properties = params
        return ['message':message]
    }
}

So to test the create action, I need to send in some values in the params map.

To make a long story short (too late, I know, but so be it), there are two ways to do it. Here’s the first one:

class MessageControllerTests extends GroovyTestCase {
    void setUp() {
        new Message(sender:'me',msg:'test').save()
    }

    void testCreate() {
        def m = Message.findBySender('me')
        def mc = new MessageController()
        mc.request.parameters = [sender:'me',msg:'test']
        def message = mc.create().message
        assertToString message, "$m"
    }

    void tearDown() {
        Message.findBySender('me').delete()
    }
}

I needed to create a new message in setUp and save it, so that it would be accessible in my test. At the end I disposed of the message in the tearDown method.

In testCreate, I set the request parameters by invoking the setParameters(Map) method of MockHttpServletRequest. That took me a while to realize — I kept trying to set a “params” variable, since that’s what exists in the controller itself. Of course, from the request point of view, the map is a collection of parameters, not params.

The other approach is to deal with the params map directly by replacing the mc.request.parameters line above with

mc.params.sender = 'me'
mc.params.msg = 'test'

That works too and does essentially the same thing. I think I prefer the setParameters version, because I can see exactly what method is being invoked that way. Still, the difference is probably just a question of style.

(My thanks to Chris Chen, ckchris@idream.net, and Burt Beckwith, burt@burtbeckwith.com, for answering my question on the Grails user’s list.)

Finally, back in March of 2007, Glen Smith (of course) wrote up a nice blog post on unit testing controllers rather than doing integration testing. That relies on mocking the request, response, session, etc. with closures. While it demonstrates an interesting usage of metaprogramming to handle all the mocks, it feels like a lot of overhead to put in for each controller. Graeme himself commented on that and suggested developing a withMockController method for GroovyTestCase that did all the overhead for you. I don’t know if that ever actually happened or not, but it looks promising.

Since the whole Grails environment doesn’t have to be bootstrapped, unit testing with those mocks is inevitably going to be faster.

At the moment, I’m quite content to do integration tests, because I’m partly doing the tests to see how the environment works.

I sometimes feel that writing tests is a lot like brushing your teeth. Dentists will tell you that there are better ways and worse ways to brush, but in all honesty, if you just do it at all you’re way ahead of the game. I’m going to try and follow that philosophy and not worry about doing tests perfectly as long as I’m doing them at all.