Global constants in Groovy

Question

It is often desired to declare constants at the top of a script that can be referenced anywhere else in the script. In Groovy, it seems that if you declare a constant using final then it isnot accessible in child scopes. What is the solution for this very basic and common requirement? The workaround I have right now is to create an unbound variable but this is not a constant and is not elegant.

Answer 1

Groovy doesn't really have a global scope. When you have a groovy script that doesn't declare a class, it implicitly gets stuck in a class with the name of the script. So final variables at the top-level scope are really just fields of the implicit class. For example:

// foo.groovy
final MYCONSTANT = "foobar"
println MYCONSTANT

class Helper {
    def hello() { println MYCONSTANT }  // won't work
}
new Helper().hello()

Is more or less equivalent to:

class foo {
    def run() {
        final MYCONSTANT = "foobar"
        println MYCONSTANT
        new Helper().hello()
    }
    static main(args) {
        new foo().run()
    }
}

class Helper {
    def hello() { println MYCONSTANT }  // won't work
}

It's easy to see why it doesn't work expanded out. An easy work around is to declare your "globals" in a dummy class called e.g. Constants, and then just do a static import on it. It even works all in a single script. Example:

import static Constants.*

class Constants {
    static final MYCONSTANT = "foobar"
}

println MYCONSTANT

class Helper {
    def hello() { println MYCONSTANT } // works!
}
new Helper().hello()

EDIT:

Also, scripts are bit of a special case. If you declare a variable without def or any modifiers such as final, (i.e. just use it) it goes into a script-wide binding. So in this case:

CONSTANT = "foobar"
println "foobar"

CONSTANT is in the script-wide binding, but in:

final CONSTANT = "foobar"
println "foobar"

CONSTANT is a local variable in the script's run() method. More information on this can be found at https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20150108090004/http://groovy.codehaus.org/Scoping+and+the+Semantics+of+%22def%22