Hello all,

I’m buiding a simple Grails Plugin that will use GORM dynamic finders and methods, but as we should know, the create-plugin grails command just install a fresh skeleton of your grails application, without any other dependencies.

First of all, you shoud install the hibernate plugin inside your plugin. Don’t worry, the hibernate will not be packaged with your plugin, but will be there to your plugin classes use.

grails install-plugin hibernate

So, now your plugin have the hibernate plugin installed and will be capable to use GORM facilities. But, if people wants to use your plugin, they will have to have hibernate plugin installed, correct? I know it cames by default in our grails application, but can be uninstalled. So we have to find some way to make our plugin dependent on hibernate plugin. Asking on the grails-user list and reading this topic in grails.org wiki, I remembered on two plugin configurations that can help us:

• dependsOn
• loadAfter

The dependsOn it’s a map inside our XptoGrailsPlugin that tells witch plugins our one depends, it takes the name of the respective plugin and its version, in my case, that’s what I did:

def dependsOn = ["hibernate":"1.1 > *"]

So, our plugin will depend on grails hibernate plugin, and at least the 1.1 version of it, none previous will be accepted and any future ones will be ok!

But sometimes this is not enougth, besides being dependent, our plugin uses dynamic finders, and runtime added method on our domain classes, so, it’ll only be successfully loaded after hibernate plugin load and adds this methods. To achieve this, we’ll use the other tag, the loadAfter to tell that our plugin will wait hibernate plugin to be loaded and the load itself.

def loadAfter = ['hibernate']

That’s it. Doing this we’ll make things work as we wanted.

PS.: just noticed, right now that Graeme Rocher pushed to github’s grails master branch, a commit that will install de default plugins into new plugin projetcs too. This sounds cool, and will avoid us the first step above, the plugin installation. Here is the commit id and link: 9cb23f5b835b633cf43079ca7e58e29c64bd3b3c