myFile.toURL() deprecated

myFile.toURL() deprecated The fix to this is quite simple:

A Groovy Continuous Integration (Jenkins) Dashboard

I took inspiration from this post, but I wanted to use Groovy. I know there are plugins that do the same, but this was intended to be a learning exercise.

Whilst the example in the link is quite simple - I also need to address authentication of the user. Once available this would be used for displaying build status via a wall mounted monitor.

Requires "commons-codec-1.8.jar" and "commons-httpclient-3.1.jar" on the classpath

Gradle Logging - writing to a log to file

This simple Gist adds 2 additional output listeners; Standard Out and Standard Error and pipes their output to a build log.

Groovy Timestamp

There's small changes you make when developing that you often disregard as too simple to matter. One such example is shown below.

Dates should be ordered: YEAR, MONTH, DAY. (e.g. YYYYMMDD, YYMMDD, YYYYMM). Time should be ordered: HOUR, MINUTES, SECONDS (HHMMSS). The reason for this is that files will always be sorted in correct chronological order.

As a build manager I use this most in my Gradle scripts for ordering the build output logs.

Initial/Test Data in Grails

When restarting my Grails application in development mode, it was becoming a pain to re-enter the test data to show people how the application worked.

Groovy provides great support for XML, and so using that for loading data was a no brainer.

First step, create a service:

 class LoadDbService {  
      def fileName  
      LoadDbService(def fileName) {  
           this.fileName = fileName  
      }  
      def load (){  
          ... detailed below ...            
      }  
 }  

This service is called from within BootStrap.groovy:

 class BootStrap {  
   def init = { servletContext ->  
           environments {  
                development {  
                     def dbs = new LoadDbService('grails-app/resources/test_data/test_records.xml')  
                     dbs.load()  
                }  
           }            
   }  

This service imports XML data into domain objects. If a domain object refers to another domain object, we user the power of GORM findBy. The implementation of load() is shown below:

 def data = new XmlSlurper().parse(fileName)  
 // These do not have dependencies and can therefore be generated easily  
 data.Release.each {  
      new Release(name: "${it.'@name'}", status: "${it.'@status'}", createdDate: new Date().parseToStringDate("${it.'@createdDate'}")).save(failOnError: true)  
 }  
 data.Stack.each {  
      new Stack(number: "${it.@'number'}").save(failOnError: true)  
 }  
 // for these imports to work correctly they need to search for the items that they relate to using .findByName  
 data.Version.each {  
      new Version(appName: "${it.@'appName'}", tag: "${it.@'tag'}", createdDate: new Date().parseToStringDate("${it.'@createdDate'}"), partOf: Release.findByName("${it.@'partOf'}")).save(failOnError: true)  
 }  
 data.Environment.each {  
      new Environment(hostname: "${it.@'hostname'}", testTier: "${it.@'testTier'}", lastRefresh: new Date().parseToStringDate("${it.'@lastRefresh'}"), ownedBy: Release.findByName("${it.@'ownedBy'}"), partOf: Stack.findByNumber("${it.@'partOf'}")).save(failOnError: true)  
 }       

And finally an example dataset:

Unfortunately, because of the format of XML conflicting with HTML I've had to provide a screenshot.

Inspiration taken from Sanjay Mysoremutt's Blog

Gradle/Groovy - get Git build meta information

When creating a release package its nice to maintain a copy of all the metadata. I like to do this using the power of Groovy from within my Gradle build scripts.

 import groovy.xml.MarkupBuilder  
 task xmlGen << {  
      def tag = "git describe --abbrev=0 --tags".execute().text  
      def sha = "git rev-parse HEAD".execute().text  
      def fw = new FileWriter("build_info.xml" )  
      def xml = new groovy.xml.MarkupBuilder(fw)  
      xml.build(id:tag){  
           ProjectName("ORCA")  
           SHA1(sha)  
           Date(new Date())  
           Components("component1, component2, component3")  
      }  
 }  

And the output is:

 <build id="v1.3.0">  
  <ProjectName>MyProject</ProjectName>   
  <SHA1>1f661e69797dc23281d2955d6ca2dda3cdd81dc0</SHA1>   
  <Date>Thu May 02 16:14:33 BST 2013</Date>   
  <Components>component1, component2, component3</Components>   
 </build>