How can I return a 404/50x status code from a Grails Controller?

Question

I have a controller that needs to return a 404 page and status code on certain conditions. I can't seem to find out how to do this in Grails. A coworker recommended this method:

response.sendError(HttpServletResponse.SC_NOT_FOUND)

which works perfectly fine, but it's not very Grails-like. I know Rails' render method take a status argument, but Grails' render has no such functionality. Is there something I'm missing, what's the best way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

response.sendError and response.setStatus are the only two ways I know of. If you static import HttpServletResponse, then it's not that 'un-grails-like' :)

Answer 2

Setting the response status with its own statement is good enough. It doesn't look too ugly and is pretty straightforward:

response.status = 404;

I've used this successfully myself and have seen others do it this way too. Since it's just a setter, you can also do other stuff after setting the status. Whichever status you set last will be what the HttpServletResponse uses when it actually sends the response back to the client.