-So, once more, with feeling.
After abandoning this idea originally, I'm revisiting it. This time I'm going to try to give a bit more detail so we can actually talk about the best way to solve the problem.
At the University where I work, one of my colleagues developed a plugin for Grails that we use for our in-house applications. It handles several different things, two in particular that I'm trying to work with: authentication and access to our Oracle database.
AuthenticationWe have an AuthenticationWrapper class in src\java that implements org.springframework.security.core.Authentication. Anywhere else in our applications where you would normally use the Authentication class (in our case, in our global_config.groovy file), we reference the AuthenticationWrapper class instead, which has methods for accessing things from the Authentication class.
You might wonder, why are we doing this? The answer is that we have some domain classes in the plugin that define some custom roles and memberships on a per-application basis. This lets us designate certain users as "admins" for a given app, for example. The AuthenticationWrapper class finds those roles and puts them in the Authentication.authorities.
DatabaseAdditionally there's a service class that has some methods that query our database for certain bits of info. In this case, the service method I want to use finds out if a person is an employee, a student, both, or neither, and just returns a plain ol' string after executing some groovy sql. I'd really like to use that method to define a generic role that we can then use in all of our applications (like, "Global_student" and "Global_employee"), so that each app doesn't have to call that service method from its own controllers.
The problemLWexler's example (first reply to the original post) simply doesn't work in my src\java file. This is the same method documented in the FAQ.
http://grails.org/FAQ#Q: How can I access domain classes from sources in src/groovy?
I can define the application context okay...
def appContext = ServletContextHolder.servletContext.getAttribute(GrailsApplicationAttributes.APPLICATION_CONTEXT)
...but when I try to define a service based on that, the resultant variable comes back null.
def myService = appContext.myService //myService is null here
I also tried specifying the package name, but still no dice.
def myService = appContext.home.package.myService //myService is null here
As a result, I can't call any method in the service without getting a null Pointer Exception.
As near as I can tell, this is a far more straightforward method for what I'm trying to accomplish. There is the alternative method that Ian, Graeme, and Burt described, and which is also documented at
http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/services.html#usingServicesFromJava. That said, it requires significantly more wiring, and I'd like to get the method that relies on a couple of imports working if I can.
I appreciate anything your grey cells can do for mine. :)
Jonny
jonnybot wrote
So, I really appreciate Roberto's answer. That said, I am inclined to agree with Burt that it may be wiser to just implement this at the controller level.
The java class in question is a wrapper used by our authentication system to retrieve roles based on the application you're using. I wanted to add a global role to this of student or employee (I work at a state university). We have a service method to retrieve that information from the database, but I wanted to stick it in the authentication layer so that the role would be assigned then.
On reflection, it is much more straightforward to just call the service method from the controller when necessary. I wanted to avoid doing that for re-usability, but after thinking more deeply about it I'm convinced that calling the service from the controller as needed is just as reusable as getting the role in the controller would be.
Thanks for helping me puzzle this one out.
Locked
