Tag: software development

The ‘CONVERT_URL_TO_LOWERCASE_BEFORE_COMPARISON’ parameter to FilterSecurityInterceptor means exactly that – URLs are converted to lower case for comparison with the patterns that you define.

If you use CONVERT_URL_TO_LOWERCASE_BEFORE_COMPARISON, then make sure all the URL patterns you specify are also in lower case, otherwise you will never get a match. This seems obvious, but it took me several hours of trial and error before I spotted what was not working in my configuration.

For example, take this snippet of configuration:

<code>
    &lt;bean id="filterInvocationInterceptor" class="org.acegisecurity.intercept.web.FilterSecurityInterceptor"&gt;
        &lt;property name="authenticationManager"&gt;
        &lt;ref bean="authenticationManager"/&gt;&lt;/property&gt;
        &lt;property name="accessDecisionManager"&gt;
        &lt;ref bean="accessDecisionManager"/&gt;&lt;/property&gt;
        &lt;property name="objectDefinitionSource"&gt;
            &lt;value&gt;
                CONVERT_URL_TO_LOWERCASE_BEFORE_COMPARISON
                PATTERN_TYPE_APACHE_ANT
                /acegilogin.jsp*=ROLE_ANONYMOUS, ROLE_ADMIN
                /=ROLE_ANONYMOUS, ROLE_ADMIN
                /index.jsp=ROLE_ANONYMOUS, ROLE_ADMIN

                /item/show/**=ROLE_ANONYMOUS, ROLE_ADMIN
                /item/list/**=ROLE_ANONYMOUS, ROLE_ADMIN
                /item/doSomeOtherThing=ROLE_ANONYMOUS, ROLE_ADMIN
                ...
    &lt;/bean&gt;
</code>

The URL ‘/item/doSomeOtherThing’ is never going to be matched, since the incoming URLs for comparison are converted to lowercase by the CONVERT_URL_TO_LOWERCASE_BEFORE_COMPARISON instruction.

Grails GORM (Grails Object Relational Mapping) allows you to define a number of validation rules that are carried through to your view when entering data.

For example with following simple Entity:

<code>
class Test1 { 
    Long id
    Long version
    String string1
    Long testLong
    Float float1
	
    def constraints = {
        string1(blank:false)
        testLong(nullable:false,blank:false)
        float1(nullable:false,blank:false)
	}
...
}
</code>

The ‘constraints’ section defines the rules on the properties on this Entity – the rules are a comma separated list of name/value pairs for the rules to be applied. Notice the ‘blank’ only works on String properties. To require a value for any other property type, use ‘nullable:false’.

Here are some further self-explanatory examples from the online Grails docs:

<code>

   def constraints = {
          login(length:5..15,blank:false,unique:true)
          password(length:5..15,blank:false)
          email(email:true,blank:false)
          age(min:new Date(),nullable:false)
   }
</code>

InfoQ.com have a summary of an article on Hacknot.info, describing the 19 most common mistakes a technical leader can make.

This is a solid list of pitfalls that every technical manager should bear in mind…

I’ve recently installed Ubuntu Linux on my laptop, and in order to get Grails running, had to do the following:

1. Edit /etc/environment and set up environment vars for Groovy, Grails and Java:

   <code>
   GRAILS_HOME=/INSTALL_DIR/grails-0.2
   GROOVY_HOME=/INSTALL_DIR/groovy-1.0-jsr-05
   JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.06
   export GRAILS_HOME GROOVY_HOME JAVA_HOME
   PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11: /usr/games:$GRAILS_HOME/bin:$GROOVY_HOME/bin"
   </code>

   This file was new to me on Ubuntu, I’m used to defining env vars in a .profile file. In order to get the new vars setup, source the file – ‘source environment’.

2. After the previous step, the included script files with Grails needed to be changed to executable in order to run. cd into the grails directory, and then ‘chmod +x’ for both INSTALL_DIR/bin/grails and INSTALL_DIR/ant/bin/ant