Specify order of fields in DDL generated from GORM classes?

Question

I use GORM to generate my database's DDL from groovy classes. Which is great. However, the order of fields in the generated SQL is not the same as the order of fields in the class. For example, if I create the class

class Person
{
  String firstName
  String lastName
  String address
  String email
}

the following SQL is generated (for MySQL)

CREATE TABLE `test` (
  `id` bigint(20) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `version` bigint(20) NOT NULL,
  `address` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `email` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `first_name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `last_name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

The fields have been sorted into alphabetical order (after the autogenerated id and version fields). This is O.K. in this instance, but I have some much wider tables in which there is important contextual information in the order of the fields.

Here is my question: How do you tell GORM to order the fields in SQL in the order of declaration in the groovy class?

Answer 1

I'm not absolutely sure about this, but the constraints closure defines the order of the fields in the views, maybe that reflects to the fields on tables.

class Person
{
  String firstName
  String lastName
  String address
  String email
}

static constraints = {
  firstName()
  lastName()
  address()
  email()
}

Answer 2

There doesn't appear to be a way to specify the ordering, but you could always create your own tables as you want them and provide name mappings in your domain classes. You could also let GORM create the tables, and then recreate the tables in the right order, and turn off the automatic DDL stuff in GORM after that. If you use the field and table names that GORM chose, you'll not need to add any mappings.