Using g.render in a grails service

Question

I'm trying to use g.render in a grails service, but it appears that g is not provided to services by default. Is there a way to get the templating engine to render a view in the service? I may be going about this the wrong way. What I'm looking to to is render the view from a partial template to a string, and send the resulting string back as part of a JSON response to be used with AJAX updates.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

My advice would be to do this in the controller. Service should have reusable logic and not depend on a view template, leave that work to the controller. Use the service to get the data you need to pass to the template, but leave the work of interacting with the template to the controller.

Answer 2

I totally agree with John's argumentation - doing GSP in services is generally a bad design decision. But no rules without exceptions! If you still want to do this, try the following approach:

class MyService implements InitializingBean {
    boolean transactional = false
    def gspTagLibraryLookup  // being automatically injected by spring
    def g

    public void afterPropertiesSet() {
        g = gspTagLibraryLookup.lookupNamespaceDispatcher("g")
        assert g
    }

    def serviceMethod() {    
       // do anything with e.g. g.render
    }
}

Using the gspTagLibraryLookup bean you can of course access every other desired taglib in a service.