12 The Service Layer

Services in Grails are the place to put the majority of the logic in your application, leaving controllers responsible for handling request flow with redirects and so on.

Creating a Service

You can create a Grails service by running the create-service command from the root of your project in a terminal window:

grails create-service helloworld.simple

If no package is specified with the create-service script, Grails automatically uses the application name as the package name.

The above example will create a service at the location grails-app/services/helloworld/SimpleService.groovy. A service's name ends with the convention Service, other than that a service is a plain Groovy class:

package helloworld
class SimpleService {
}

12.1 Declarative Transactions

Default Declarative Transactions

Services are typically involved with coordinating logic between domain classes, and hence often involved with persistence that spans large operations. Given the nature of services, they frequently require transactional behaviour. You can use programmatic transactions with the withTransaction method, however this is repetitive and doesn't fully leverage the power of Spring's underlying transaction abstraction.

Services enable transaction demarcation, which is a declarative way of defining which methods are to be made transactional. All services are transactional by default. To disable this set the transactional property to false:

class CountryService {
    static transactional = false
}

You may also set this property to true to make it clear that the service is intentionally transactional.

Warning: dependency injection is the only way that declarative transactions work. You will not get a transactional service if you use the new operator such as new BookService()

The result is that all methods are wrapped in a transaction and automatic rollback occurs if a method throws a runtime exception (i.e. one that extends RuntimeException) or an Error. The propagation level of the transaction is by default set to PROPAGATION_REQUIRED.

Checked exceptions do not roll back transactions. Even though Groovy blurs the distinction between checked and unchecked exceptions, Spring isn't aware of this and its default behaviour is used, so it's important to understand the distinction between checked and unchecked exceptions.

Custom Transaction Configuration

Grails also provides @Transactional and @NotTransactional annotations for cases where you need more fine-grained control over transactions at a per-method level or need to specify an alternative propagation level. For example, the @NotTransactional annotation can be used to mark a particular method to be skipped when a class is annotated with @Transactional.

The grails.transaction.Transactional annotation was first introduced in Grails 2.3. Prior to 2.3, Spring's @Transactional annotation was used.

Annotating a service method with Transactional disables the default Grails transactional behavior for that service (in the same way that adding transactional=false does) so if you use any annotations you must annotate all methods that require transactions.

In this example listBooks uses a read-only transaction, updateBook uses a default read-write transaction, and deleteBook is not transactional (probably not a good idea given its name).

import org.springframework.transaction.annotation.Transactional
class BookService {
    @Transactional(readOnly = true)
    def listBooks() {
        Book.list()
    }
    @Transactional
    def updateBook() {
        // …
    }
    def deleteBook() {
        // …
    }
}

You can also annotate the class to define the default transaction behavior for the whole service, and then override that default per-method. For example, this service is equivalent to one that has no annotations (since the default is implicitly transactional=true):

import org.springframework.transaction.annotation.Transactional
@Transactional
class BookService {
    def listBooks() {
        Book.list()
    }
    def updateBook() {
        // …
    }
    def deleteBook() {
        // …
    }
}

This version defaults to all methods being read-write transactional (due to the class-level annotation), but the listBooks method overrides this to use a read-only transaction:

import org.springframework.transaction.annotation.Transactional
@Transactional
class BookService {
    @Transactional(readOnly = true)
    def listBooks() {
        Book.list()
    }
    def updateBook() {
        // …
    }
    def deleteBook() {
        // …
    }
}

Although updateBook and deleteBook aren't annotated in this example, they inherit the configuration from the class-level annotation.

For more information refer to the section of the Spring user guide on Using @Transactional.

Unlike Spring you do not need any prior configuration to use Transactional; just specify the annotation as needed and Grails will detect them up automatically.

12.1.1 Transactions Rollback and the Session

Understanding Transactions and the Hibernate Session

When using transactions there are important considerations you must take into account with regards to how the underlying persistence session is handled by Hibernate. When a transaction is rolled back the Hibernate session used by GORM is cleared. This means any objects within the session become detached and accessing uninitialized lazy-loaded collections will lead to LazyInitializationExceptions.

To understand why it is important that the Hibernate session is cleared. Consider the following example:

class Author {
    String name
    Integer age
    static hasMany = [books: Book]
}

If you were to save two authors using consecutive transactions as follows:

Author.withTransaction { status ->
    new Author(name: "Stephen King", age: 40).save()
    status.setRollbackOnly()
}
Author.withTransaction { status ->
    new Author(name: "Stephen King", age: 40).save()
}

Only the second author would be saved since the first transaction rolls back the author save() by clearing the Hibernate session. If the Hibernate session were not cleared then both author instances would be persisted and it would lead to very unexpected results.

It can, however, be frustrating to get LazyInitializationExceptions due to the session being cleared.

For example, consider the following example:

class AuthorService {
    void updateAge(id, int age) {
        def author = Author.get(id)
        author.age = age
        if (author.isTooOld()) {
            throw new AuthorException("too old", author)
        }
    }
}

class AuthorController {
    def authorService
    def updateAge() {
        try {
            authorService.updateAge(params.id, params.int("age"))
        }
        catch(e) {
            render "Author books ${e.author.books}"
        }
    }
}

In the above example the transaction will be rolled back if the Author's age exceeds the maximum value defined in the isTooOld() method by throwing an AuthorException. The AuthorException references the author but when the books association is accessed a LazyInitializationException will be thrown because the underlying Hibernate session has been cleared.

To solve this problem you have a number of options. One is to ensure you query eagerly to get the data you will need:

class AuthorService {
    …
    void updateAge(id, int age) {
        def author = Author.findById(id, [fetch:[books:"eager"]])
        ...

In this example the books association will be queried when retrieving the Author.

This is the optimal solution as it requires fewer queries then the following suggested solutions.

Another solution is to redirect the request after a transaction rollback:

class AuthorController {
    AuthorService authorService
    def updateAge() {
        try {
            authorService.updateAge(params.id, params.int("age"))
        }
        catch(e) {
            flash.message = "Can't update age"
            redirect action:"show", id:params.id
        }
    }
}

In this case a new request will deal with retrieving the Author again. And, finally a third solution is to retrieve the data for the Author again to make sure the session remains in the correct state:

class AuthorController {
    def authorService
    def updateAge() {
        try {
            authorService.updateAge(params.id, params.int("age"))
        }
        catch(e) {
            def author = Author.read(params.id)
            render "Author books ${author.books}"
        }
    }
}

Validation Errors and Rollback

A common use case is to rollback a transaction if there are validation errors. For example consider this service:

import grails.validation.ValidationException
class AuthorService {
    void updateAge(id, int age) {
        def author = Author.get(id)
        author.age = age
        if (!author.validate()) {
            throw new ValidationException("Author is not valid", author.errors)
        }
    }
}

To re-render the same view that a transaction was rolled back in you can re-associate the errors with a refreshed instance before rendering:

import grails.validation.ValidationException
class AuthorController {
    def authorService
    def updateAge() {
        try {
            authorService.updateAge(params.id, params.int("age"))
        }
        catch (ValidationException e) {
            def author = Author.read(params.id)
            author.errors = e.errors
            render view: "edit", model: [author:author]
        }
    }
}

12.2 Scoped Services

You can change this behaviour by placing a service in a particular scope. The supported scopes are:

• prototype - A new service is created every time it is injected into another class
• request - A new service will be created per request
• flash - A new service will be created for the current and next request only
• flow - In web flows the service will exist for the scope of the flow
• conversation - In web flows the service will exist for the scope of the conversation. ie a root flow and its sub flows
• session - A service is created for the scope of a user session
• singleton (default) - Only one instance of the service ever exists

If your service is flash, flow or conversation scoped it must implement java.io.Serializable and can only be used in the context of a Web Flow.

To enable one of the scopes, add a static scope property to your class whose value is one of the above, for example

static scope = "flow"

Upgrade note: Starting with Grails 2.3, new applications are generated with configuration that defaults the scope of controllers to singleton. If singleton controllers interact with prototype scoped services, the services effectively behave as per-controller singletons. If non-singleton services are required, controller scope should be changed as well.

See Controllers and Scopes in the user guide for more information.

12.3 Dependency Injection and Services

Dependency Injection Basics

A key aspect of Grails services is the ability to use Spring Framework's dependency injection features. Grails supports "dependency injection by convention". In other words, you can use the property name representation of the class name of a service to automatically inject them into controllers, tag libraries, and so on.

As an example, given a service called BookService, if you define a property called bookService in a controller as follows:

class BookController {
    def bookService
    …
}

In this case, the Spring container will automatically inject an instance of that service based on its configured scope. All dependency injection is done by name. You can also specify the type as follows:

class AuthorService {
    BookService bookService
}

NOTE: Normally the property name is generated by lower casing the first letter of the type. For example, an instance of the BookService class would map to a property named bookService.

To be consistent with standard JavaBean conventions, if the first 2 letters of the class name are upper case, the property name is the same as the class name. For example, the property name of the JDBCHelperService class would be JDBCHelperService, not jDBCHelperService or jdbcHelperService.

See section 8.8 of the JavaBean specification for more information on de-capitalization rules.

Only the top level object is subjected to injection as traversing all nested objects to perform injection would be a performance issue.

Dependency Injection and Services

You can inject services in other services with the same technique. If you had an AuthorService that needed to use the BookService, declaring the AuthorService as follows would allow that:

class AuthorService {
    def bookService
}

Dependency Injection and Domain Classes / Tag Libraries

You can even inject services into domain classes and tag libraries, which can aid in the development of rich domain models and views:

class Book {
    …
    def bookService
    def buyBook() {
        bookService.buyBook(this)
    }
}

Service Bean Names

The default bean name which is associated with a service can be problematic if there are multiple services with the same name defined in different packages. For example consider the situation where an application defines a service class named com.demo.ReportingService and the application uses a plugin named ReportingUtilities and that plugin provides a service class named com.reporting.util.ReportingService. The default bean name for each of those would be reportingService so they would conflict with each other. Grails manages this by changing the default bean name for services provided by plugins by prefixing the bean name with the plugin name. In the scenario described above the reportingService bean would be an instance of the com.demo.ReportingService class defined in the application and the reportingUtilitiesReportingService bean would be an instance of the com.reporting.util.ReportingService class provided by the ReportingUtilities plugin. For all service beans provided by plugins, if there are no other services with the same name within the application or other plugins in the application then a bean alias will be created which does not include the plugin name and that alias points to the bean referred to by the name that does include the plugin name prefix. For example, if the ReportingUtilities plugin provides a service named com.reporting.util.AuthorService and there is no other AuthorService in the application or in any of the plugins that the application is using then there will be a bean named reportingUtilitiesAuthorService which is an instance of this com.reporting.util.AuthorService class and there will be a bean alias defined in the context named authorService which points to that same bean.

12.4 Using Services from Java

class BookService {
    void buyBook(Book book) {
        // logic
    }
}

However, this can be rectified by placing this class in a package, by moving the class into a sub directory such as grails-app/services/bookstore and then modifying the package declaration:

package bookstore
class BookService {
    void buyBook(Book book) {
        // logic
    }
}

An alternative to packages is to instead have an interface within a package that the service implements:

package bookstore
interface BookStore {
    void buyBook(Book book)
}

And then the service:

class BookService implements bookstore.BookStore {
    void buyBook(Book b) {
        // logic
    }
}

This latter technique is arguably cleaner, as the Java side only has a reference to the interface and not to the implementation class (although it's always a good idea to use packages). Either way, the goal of this exercise to enable Java to statically resolve the class (or interface) to use, at compile time.

Now that this is done you can create a Java class within the src/java directory and add a setter that uses the type and the name of the bean in Spring:

// src/java/bookstore/BookConsumer.java
package bookstore;
public class BookConsumer {
    private BookStore store;
    public void setBookStore(BookStore storeInstance) {
        this.store = storeInstance;
    }
    …
}

Once this is done you can configure the Java class as a Spring bean in grails-app/conf/spring/resources.xml (for more information see the section on Grails and Spring):

<bean id="bookConsumer" class="bookstore.BookConsumer">
    <property name="bookStore" ref="bookService" />
</bean>

or in grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy:

import bookstore.BookConsumer
beans = {
    bookConsumer(BookConsumer) {
        bookStore = ref("bookService")
    }
}