The usually simple upgrade process in Grails has caused me a few headaches in moving from 1.2.2 to 1.3.1. I skipped the 1.3 upgrade because there were a few people having issues on the mailing list but yesterday I bit the bullet and encountered a couple of problems.

I think the release notes for Grails 1.3.x have been unusually poor so this post has the issues I’ve encountered in the hope that you won’t go quite as mad as I have. I’ll keep it updated if I find more problems.

Controller defaultAction must now be static

Not much more to say, but if like me you’ve been doing this in your controllers:

    def defaultAction = "open"

you’ll need to do this instead:

    static defaultAction = "open"

Otherwise you’ll get a tomcat 404 error saying that “resource() is not available”

Missing dependencies

Now I can’t say if this was me doing something wrong or a problem with the upgrade process, but when I tried to run my app for the first time I got all sorts of dependency problems. I don’t use Maven, or any Maven repos (in fact I don’t like Maven, but that’s another post for another day) but I was getting lots of Maven output suggesting lookups for every dependency were being made to a remote repo.

I eventually solved the problem by adding grailsCentral() to my repositories in the build.config, quite why it wasn’t there in the first place I don’t know:

grails.project.class.dir = "target/classes"
grails.project.test.class.dir = "target/test-classes"
grails.project.test.reports.dir = "target/test-reports"
grails.project.dependency.resolution = {

    inherits("global") {
    }
    log "warn" // log level of Ivy resolver, either 'error', 'warn', 'info', 'debug' or 'verbose'
    repositories {
        grailsPlugins()
        grailsHome()
        grailsCentral()
    }
    dependencies {
        runtime 'mysql:mysql-connector-java:5.1.5'
    }
}