Grails time duration formatting tag library

Grails has 3 clean formatting tag libraries:

formatDate
formatNumber
formatBoolean

Wonder if there is one to format seconds into HH:MM:SS? or if there is another elegant way to format seconds in the rendered view.

Note:

formatDate does not work since there might be more seconds than 86400. So for a duration of 86461 formatDate will return a 00:01:01 where in fact it should be 24:01:01.

Solution

You could create a tag lib: Put SecondsTagLib.groovy into grails-app/taglib/ (both the location, and the suffix TagLib in the class name do matter).

class SecondsTagLib {
  def formatSeconds = { 
    attrs, body ->
      final int hours = attrs.seconds / (60 * 60)
      final int remainder = attrs.seconds % (60 * 60)
      final int minutes = remainder / 60
      final int seconds = remainder % 60

      out << hours.toString().padLeft(2, "0") + ":" + minutes.toString().padLeft(2, "0") + ":" + seconds.toString().padLeft(2, "0")
  }
}

and use that taglib in your view:

<html>
  <body>
    Seconds: ${seconds} = <g:formatSeconds seconds="${seconds}"/>
  </body>
</html>

the controller's method could look like this:

class TagLibController {
  def seconds() { 
    // 10:11:01
    def seconds = (10 * 60 * 60) + (11 * 60) + 1
    def model = ["seconds": seconds]
    render(view: "seconds", model: model)
  }
}