Dynamic Grails Application Configuration

If you deploy your grails applications with war files you may find it necessary implement an application configuration mechanism that lives outside the web-space. My first though was to use and external file, probably xml and read it in when needed. But, I decided that persisting configurations to the database provided a much more universal solution. It also avails itself to adding a UI or acting as a remote web-service.

The Domain Object, AppConfig is very simple. It has a name, parameter, value and status:

class AppConfig {
 String name
 String parameter
 String value
 String status
}

The "name" and "parameter" columns uniquely identify the configuration setting and the "value" is a string representation of the parameter's value. The status can be anything, but I find it useful to set the target environment, e.g., 'dev' or 'test'. I usually use the class name as the configuration name, so looping through a set of parameters is as easy as this:

AppConfig.findAllByName( this.class.name ).each { p ->
 switch(p.parameter) {
   case 'enabled': enabled = (p.value == 'true' ? true : false)
   case 'other': other = p.value
   case 'anInt: myInt = Integer.parseInt( p.value )
 }
}

I use a standard dataset loader to read in and insert settings on application startup taking care not to clobber existing values. Configurations are read in during development, test and production.

A typical use is to set parameters for Quartz Jobs. This way, the parameters are read each time the job starts to dynamically configure actions. The most common is to enable or disable the job. This comes in handy if a job goes bad but you can't bring down the web server.