Restricting the length of a string on gsps is a common scenario in most of our projects.
Groovy’s metaprogramming magic made it too simple for me. I added the following lines of code to Bootstrap.groovy:
Object.metaClass.trimLength = {Integer stringLength ->
String trimString = delegate?.toString()
String concatenateString = "..."
List separators = [".", " "]
if (stringLength && (trimString?.length() > stringLength)) {
trimString = trimString.substring(0, stringLength - concatenateString.length())
String separator = separators.findAll{trimString.contains(it)}?.min{trimString.lastIndexOf(it)}
if(separator){
trimString = trimString.substring(0, trimString.lastIndexOf(separator))
}
trimString += concatenateString
}
return trimString
}
Now, for an instance of class Person:
class Person {
String name
String toString(){
return name
}
}
Person person = new Person(name: "Aman Aggarwal")
I can simply write this code in gsp:
person.trimLength(10)
which renders output:
Aman...
Hope it helps.
~Aman Aggarwal
aman@intelligrape.com
Thanks Aman. This blog really made my life easy in my current project. I am really surprised that groovy does not provide something of this sort out of box.
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We used the following approach on our project:
// File: Bootstrap.groovy
import org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils
def init = { ctx ->
String.mixin StringUtils
}
Now we can use “abcdefg”.abbreviate(6) to get ‘abc…’
What happened? We added all static methods from StringUtils with a first argument of type String to the String class, so we can use them in our application.