Grails: How to reference a resource located inside an installed plugin?

Question

I have a Grails plugin which I’m using as basically a container for some shared static resources that will be used by various other Grails projects in-house (CSS, JS files, etc). The idea of using a plugin was just to share these things — the plugin doesn’t really do anything else very interesting. What is the best way to directly reference resources inside the plugin? I’d rather not create custom taglibs, since I’m not really adding any functionality here; I just want access to the resources inside the plugin — something like this, e.g., to reference a CSS file from a GSP:

<g:link rel="stylesheet" url="${resource(dir:'css', file:'mycss.css',
plugin:'myplugin')}"/>

Does this idea violate the concept of plugins, where only certain aspects of it should be exposed, and the rest is a black box? Alternative approaches to sharing static resources among related Grails projects are also welcome, in case I’m headed down an insane, wrong-headed path by even trying this. :)

Answer 1

First, in Grails, a plugin is not considered a black box. To the contrary, all the code is exposed; if you really want to make it a black box, then you should use another plugin, Binary Artifacts.

Secondly, your approach is very sensible. To access plugin resources, I would have created a taglib like:

def res = { attrs -> 
  attrs.dir=pluginContextPath
  //Do whatever you want here
  out << g.resource(attrs) 
}

and call it the same way as <g:resource>. That way, you don’t even have to expose your plugin’s resources path. The Nimble plugin is using this approach.

Also you might have a look at the Grails Resources plugin, which is trying to handle the nightmare of static resource dependencies among Grails plugins and projects. I have never used it, but for sure in my next Grails project, I will integrate it (BTW, it will be included into Grails 1.4).