{"id":10498,"date":"2014-04-09T14:50:55","date_gmt":"2014-04-09T09:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/?p=10498"},"modified":"2016-12-19T15:31:55","modified_gmt":"2016-12-19T10:01:55","slug":"customizing-url-formats-in-grails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/customizing-url-formats-in-grails\/","title":{"rendered":"Customizing URL Formats in Grails (Making your URLs case insensitive)"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I started working on Grails I quickly noticed one caveat in its URL patterns. I wonder why on the Earth anybody would want such camel casing in URLs. Misreading the case sensitive nature of a Grails app URL can lead to broken links and 404 errors. That means you need to be careful when playing with how your URLs look like.<\/p>\n

For example:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/localhost:8080\/myapp\/someLong\/someAction<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

works perfectly fine.<\/p>\n

But when I entered following URL patterns<\/p>\n

http:\/\/localhost:8080\/myapp\/somelong\/someaction
\nor<\/p>\n

http:\/\/localhost:8080\/myapp\/SomeLong\/SOMEACTION<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I get a HTTP Status 404<\/strong> that is “Page Not found”<\/strong> message.<\/p>\n

It does not matter what part I write in lower case it will just throw same HTTP Status code.<\/p>\n

The culprit here is routing engine of Grails. It’s configured to use the default settings. And how does Grails do that? Simply by implementing the grails.web.UrlConverter<\/strong> interface in a class named grails.web.CamelCaseUrlConverter<\/strong>. But as always this is just a convention not a requirement. So I went ahead and changed this by plugging in a new behavior or converter.<\/p>\n

So I created a new converter named LowerCaseUrlConverter<\/strong>. The name need not contain UrlConverter<\/strong> suffix, it’s here just to tell us that it implements some
\nUrlConverter<\/strong>. So here is the code:<\/p>\n

[sourcecode language=”java”]
\npackage com.myapp.utils<\/p>\n

import grails.web.UrlConverter<\/p>\n

class LowerCaseUrlConverter implements UrlConverter {<\/p>\n

@Override
\n String toUrlElement(String propertyOrClassName) {
\n if (propertyOrClassName) {
\n \/\/ If there is some class name or method name in url then convert it to lowercase.
\n propertyOrClassName.toLowerCase()
\n } else {
\n \/\/ Else return default name.
\n propertyOrClassName
\n }
\n }
\n}
\n[\/sourcecode]<\/p>\n

Now put this class in src\/groovy<\/strong> folder because it’s a Groovy file named LowerCaseUrlConverter.groovy<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Next is to configure this bean so that Grails knows it needs to use new implementation of grails.web.UrlConverter<\/strong>, so that other parts of Grails can generate
\nlowercase URLs from its g.createLink()<\/strong> and redirect()<\/strong> and other methods.<\/p>\n

So open up grails-app\/conf\/spring\/resources.groovy<\/strong> file, and put inside beans<\/strong> closure this line:<\/p>\n

[sourcecode language=”java”]<\/p>\n

&amp;quot;${grails.web.UrlConverter.BEAN_NAME}&amp;quot; (com.myapp.utils.LowerCaseUrlConverter)<\/p>\n

[\/sourcecode]<\/p>\n

And that’s all we need to do. Now we are good to go with all lowercase URLs<\/p>\n

http:\/\/localhost:8080\/myapp\/somelong\/someaction<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can even check it with some more combinations like:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/localhost:8080\/myapp\/Somelong\/Someaction
\nhttp:\/\/localhost:8080\/myapp\/someLong\/someAction<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

or if you are crazy enough and gone nuts you can also try this:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/localhost:8080\/myapp\/SoMeLoNg\/sOmEaCtIoN<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One last thing.
\nI didn’t tell you about one more class that Grails has up its sleeves. And that’s the grails.web.HyphenatedUrlConverter<\/strong> class. You can guess by name what it does.<\/p>\n

One word of caution: You can’t have more than one implementation of URLConverter<\/strong> in grails-app\/conf\/spring\/resources.groovy<\/strong> file. However default one will always work regardless if you provide your implementation or not!<\/p>\n

Now I feel safer with my URLs… \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

Manvendra Singh<\/p>\n

My LinkedIn<\/p>\n

@Manvendra_SK<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I started working on Grails I quickly noticed one caveat in its URL patterns. I wonder why on the Earth anybody would want such camel casing in URLs. Misreading the case sensitive nature of a Grails app URL can lead to broken links and 404 errors. That means you need to be careful when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":4},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10498"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}