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Grails: Javascript files in views folder

I'd like to split my views in Grails into 2 files a .gsp file and a .js file so that I get a cleaner Javascript separation from my views. So here's an example:

views/index.gsp
views/index.js
views/home/index.jsp
views/home/index.js

But when I simply add the index.js script reference like this:

<script src="index.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

all I get is a 404.

Does anyone knows how to deal with this?

A great benefit would be to have the ability to use view data inside the index.js file to produce the desired content.

Matthias.

Solution

  • Actually, it should be perfectly possible to serve a JS file (or any other file type) as a GSP from your grails-app/views/ directory. The only thing you have to do, is define a suitable URL mapping for those GSPs, e.g.:

    "/javascript/home/index"(view:'/home/index.js')

    With this URL mapping, you can put your JS code into grails-app/views/home/index.js.gsp (note the trailing .gsp) and you can use any grails tags in your JS source. To ensure that your JS is delivered with the correct content type, you may want to place

    <%@ page contentType="text/javascript"%>

    at the beginning of your GSP.

    Unfortunately, the createLink tag doesn't support link rewriting to views, but it should be easy to write your own tag to create those links.

    Anyways, keep in mind that this won't have a very positive impact on your app's performance. It's usually better to have static JS files (and also serve them as static resources) while passing dynamic stuff as parameters to JS functions for example. This will also keep you from some headaches wrt. caching etc.