Question

I’m trying to consume a html template with a Grails app. I’m given a URL and need to dynamically load the html into my Grails views on run time. Within the HTML code there is a {title} and a {content} tag, where my Grails code will be injected.

In PHP it would be something like include(“url”); Now how do we do this in Grails, or is it possible?

Answer 1

without caching and without a real tempalting solition, you code could look like this:

def template = new Url('http://example.com').getText()
def html
html = html.replaceAll('{title}','my Title')
html = html.replaceAll('{content}','my Content')

but Raphael is absolutly right: you should take a look at the groovy template framework if you need a more sophisticated solution (http://groovy.codehaus.org/Groovy+Templates).

With the template framework, you would first prepare your template

import groovy.text.SimpleTemplateEngine
def template = new Url('http://example.com').getText()
template = template.replaceAll('{title}','${title}')
template = tamplate.replaceAll('{content}','${content}')

and save it to the database as cache. When you have to greate your HTML page, you would fetch the template and let groovy replace the placeholders:

def binding = [title:"my Title", content:"my Content"]
def engine = new SimpleTemplateEngine()
html = engine.createTemplate(template).make(binding)

that’s it.