Configuring Reference Data In Grails (Redux)

A while back, in Configuring Reference Data In Grails, I talked about declaring elements in resources.groovy that could then be used to populate drop-down boxes in GSPs (to give one example).

Today, I found out an alternative way of declaring things:

beans = {
  xmlns util: "http://www.springframework.org/schema/util"

  util.list(id: 'myList') {
    value 'String 0'
    (1..5).each { value "String $it" }
    value 'String n'
  }

  util.map(id: 'myMap') {
    entry key: 'k0', value: 'v0'
    (1..5).each { entry key: "k$it", value: "v$it" }    
    entry key: 'kn', value: 'vn'
  }
}

I was long used to doing this in ‘plain’ Spring but wasn’t sure that I could actually use the ‘util’ namespace stuff in Grails.

Thanks to SpringSource’s Jeff Brown for pointing out on grails-user how to do it.