As I am a lazy programmer most of the time I dont implement toString and equals methods on my grails domain classes. I would like to say thanks to Groovy for helping me out and giving me a ready made recipe for this. Now I just need to annotate my class with ToString and EqualAndHashCode annotation it adds appropriate implementation of these methods for me. Now My domain class looks something like this.

@ToString(includeNames = true, includeFields = true, excludes = 'dateCreated,lastUpdated,metaClass')
@EqualsAndHashCode
class Item {
    String name
    Float price
    boolean active = true
    Date dateCreated
    Date lastUpdated
}

Before adding this annotation my domain class toString looks like this

Item item = new Item(name: "Chips", active: false, price: 15)
println "To String output -: " + item //To String output -: com.intelligrape.myapp.Item : null

Now I get the following output for Item object toString

Item item = new Item(name: "Chips", active: false, price: 15)
println "To String output -: " + item //To String output -: com.intelligrape.myapp.Item(name:Chips, price:15.0, active:false)

To get this annotation on all my domain classed I updated the template of grails domain classes so that whenever I do create-domain-class it give me the annotated domain classes

@artifact.package@
import groovy.transform.EqualsAndHashCode
import groovy.transform.ToString

@ToString(includeNames = true, includeFields = true, excludes = 'dateCreated,lastUpdated,metaClass')
@EqualsAndHashCode
class @artifact.name@ {

    Date dateCreated
    Date lastUpdated
}

Hope it helps

## Uday Pratap Singh ##
uday@intelligrape.com
www.IntelliGrape.com/
in.linkedin.com/in/meudaypratap

Annotations really provides a whole new view of programming things. Groovy also provides some of its own annotations one of them is Category. Lets take an example of using it. We create a IntegerUtil class and annotate it with Category.

@Category(Integer)
class IntegerUtil {
    List<Integer> multiples(Integer upto) {
        (1..upto).collect {this * it}
    }
}

Now the above code made your class any other groovy category class for example Time Category. Now you can use these methods as follows -:

List<Integer> multiples
use(IntegerUtil) {
    multiples = 2.multiples(10)
}
println multiples  // Output -: [2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20]

It really helps when you want some more helper methods on already existing classes.


Hope it helps


## Uday Pratap Singh ##
uday@intelligrape.com
www.IntelliGrape.com/
in.linkedin.com/in/meudaypratap