Using g.render in a grails service

Question

I'm trying to use g.render in a grails service, but it appears that g is not provided to services by default. Is there a way to get the templating engine to render a view in the service? I may be going about this the wrong way. What I'm looking to to is render the view from a partial template to a string, and send the resulting string back as part of a JSON response to be used with AJAX updates.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

I totally agree with John's argumentation - doing GSP in services is generally a bad design decision. But no rules without exceptions! If you still want to do this, try the following approach:

class MyService implements InitializingBean {
    boolean transactional = false
    def gspTagLibraryLookup  // being automatically injected by spring
    def g

    public void afterPropertiesSet() {
        g = gspTagLibraryLookup.lookupNamespaceDispatcher("g")
        assert g
    }

    def serviceMethod() {    
       // do anything with e.g. g.render
    }
}

Using the gspTagLibraryLookup bean you can of course access every other desired taglib in a service.