{"id":3877,"date":"2011-06-15T13:43:12","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T08:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/?p=3877"},"modified":"2012-09-23T18:13:40","modified_gmt":"2012-09-23T12:43:40","slug":"grails-dynamically-create-instance-of-a-pogo-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/grails-dynamically-create-instance-of-a-pogo-class\/","title":{"rendered":"Grails: Dynamically create instance of a POGO class"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hi guys,<br \/>\n<br \/>\nRecently on a project, I was creating a number of command objects to accept incoming parameters from a POST call from an iPhone with which I needed to sync data. I created a parent class for all command object classes to accept the common properties and created individual command object classes to accept any additional parameters.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe use case was that the name of the command object class was being created dynamically from the URL. Now, when I was trying to create a new instance of a command object in a controller using the following code, I got a ClassNotFoundException to my utter surprise:<br \/>\n<br \/>\n[code]<br \/>\nDefaultGrailsApplication grailsApplication = ApplicationHolder.application.mainContext.getBean(&quot;grailsApplication&quot;)<br \/>\ndef clazz = grailsApplication.getClassForName(&quot;com.intelligrape.co.sync.SyncCO&quot;).newInstance()<br \/>\n[\/code]<br \/>\n<br \/>\nSo I tried going through the Java style of fetching a class instance as follows:<br \/>\n<br \/>\n[code]<br \/>\ndef clazz = Class.forName(&quot;com.intelligrape.co.sync.SyncCO&quot;).newInstance()<br \/>\n[\/code]<\/p>\n<p>Needless to say, I ran into the same problem again. After a lot of searching on the Internet and headbanging, I realized that classes in the <em>src\/groovy<\/em> or <em>src\/java<\/em> are not available to the grails class loader and they are loaded by the <em>URLClassLoader<\/em> which is a subclass of Java&#8217;s <em>ClassLoader<\/em>. Along with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/author\/uday\/\">Uday&#8217;s<\/a> help and a <a href=\"http:\/\/grails.1312388.n4.nabble.com\/classloading-question-td1348143.html\">nabble post<\/a>, I realized that I needed to use the three parameter <em>Class.forName()<\/em> method to create a new instance of a POGO or a POJO.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nI ended up using the following syntax which worked for me in this case:<br \/>\n<br \/>\n[code]<br \/>\ndef clazz = Class.forName(&quot;com.intelligrape.co.sync.SyncCO&quot;, true, Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader()).newInstance()<br \/>\n[\/code]<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe above code gets a reference of the current executing thread&#8217;s root class loader to fetch an instance of all classes loaded in the current executing application. Documentation for the method is located here: <a href=\"http:\/\/download.oracle.com\/javase\/1,5.0\/docs\/api\/java\/lang\/Class.html#forName%28java.lang.String,%20boolean,%20java.lang.ClassLoader%29\">Class.forName()<\/a><br \/>\n<br \/>\nI hope this helps any lost soul who has tried and failed at creating a new instance of a POGO.<br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi guys, Recently on a project, I was creating a number of command objects to accept incoming parameters from a POST call from an iPhone with which I needed to sync data. I created a parent class for all command object classes to accept the common properties and created individual command object classes to accept [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":12},"categories":[7],"tags":[4840,9,4844],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877"}],"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\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}