सम्प्रेषण (Sampreshan)

संगच्छध्वं सं वदध्वं सं वो मनांसि जानताम्‌। देवा भागं यथा पूर्वे संजानाना उपासते॥ ऋग्वेद 12/191.4

QuickTip

QuickTip: Grails Selenium IDE – “Firefox extension not compatible with browser”

· · Leave a Comment

These days I am looking at Grails functional testing part. For recording Selenium scripts, generally the best thing to use is Firefox IDE plugin. It’s possible to convert the Selenium scripts to a test-case in the related programming language (Java, PHP, C# etc). I was looking for a similar formatter for Grails also which is available at github.

I tried to install it but it complained with an error “Firefox extension not compatible with browser” which simply means that the plugin has not been tested with related FireFox version. As Firefox versions are progressing like anything, people are having hard time to find suitable plugin version. As I said earlier, though the plugin is not tested with relevant Firefox version, it doesn’t mean that it won’t work with latest Firefox version.

For Grails Selenium IDE formatter issue, I looked at a blog which provided the solution to my problem. I edited the Grails IDE formatter source code based on the directions mentioned in this blog and it worked like a charm.

QuickTip : Grails 2 on Cygwin doesn’t work – Error opening zip file or JAR manifest missing

· · Leave a Comment

Installing new version of Grails is easy. However it’s quite a pain to make it running on Cygwin. The problem is as follows:

Jdk 5 introduced “javaagent” as one of the JAVA_OPTS and it has been used in running Grails 2. Shell scripts convert $GRAILS_HOME in cygwin format for running grails. So for instance if $GRAILS_HOME is c:/grails, it becomes ‘/cygdrive/c’ in cygwin format. This makes

[bash]
AGENT_STRING=-"-javaagent:$GRAILS_HOME/lib/com.springsource.springloaded/springloaded-core/jars/springloaded-core-0.8.4.jar
[/bash]

to something like this:

[bash]
$ echo $AGENT_STRING
$ "-javaagent:/cygdrive/c/grails/lib/com.springsource.springloaded/springloaded-core/jars/springloaded-core-0.8.4.jar
[/bash]

which JRE doesn’t understand while executing ‘java’. It expects -javaagent value to be something like ‘c:/grails/lib/com.springsource.springloaded/springloaded-core/jars/springloaded-core-0.8.4.jar’.

To make it work, following changes need to be done in $GRAILS_HOME/bin/startGrails script:

Introduce a new variable something like GRAILS_HOME_FORWARD_SLASH before making any change to environment based $GRAILS_HOME.

[bash]
# For Cygwin, ensure paths are in UNIX format before anything is touched

GRAILS_HOME_FORWARD_SLASH=`echo $GRAILS_HOME|sed ‘s/[\]/\//g’`
[/bash]

Also change the way AGENT_STRING is defined as follows:

[bash]
AGENT_STRING="-javaagent:$GRAILS_HOME_FORWARD_SLASH/lib/com.springsource.springloaded/springloaded-core/jars/springloaded-core-0.8.4.jar -noverify -Dspringloaded=profile=grails"
[/bash]

This change lets you work with Grails 2 now on Cygwin

QuickTip: Tree on CygWin

· · Leave a Comment

I like tree command on linux which provide you the snapshot of the directory structure and files in a tree view. Something like this:

As most of the times I use CygWin on Windows, I wanted to get ‘tree’ working here too. I could find the source of it at http://freshmeat.net/projects/tree/ which I compiled and installed based on the instructions mentioned.

Though it worked but I started getting problems because of non-ASCII characters used in the ‘tree’ output. For that I installed mintty. ‘mintty’ is even cooler to use on top of cygwin. At the same time I got ‘tree’ command working the way I wanted.

QuickTip: Changing Resolution on VirtualBox

· · Leave a Comment

Recently I installed Ubuntu on VirtualBox. After installation, to my shock I could see only 800 x 600 and even lower screen resolutions. If you want to change the resolution the way you want, here is the tip:

  • When you open your Ubuntu session through VirtualBox, at first you see the following screenshot

  • Most of the times we ignore these popups. But right now it contains information which is necessary to fix the current issue. If you don’t see any menu called “Devices” in the main VM window after you are all done with opening the Ubuntu session, you need to use right-ctrl+C and you will see some “Devices” menu options in the main window.
  • Click on “Install Guest Addons” in the Devices menu which will mount a CD on Ubuntu available on Desktop.
  • Right click and run the CD which will install the necessary add-ons.
  • Restart the VM and you will see yet another resolution option “1024 x 768”

Cool so far. However it was still not sufficient to my taste considering we all have big monitors. To change the resolutions bigger than 1024 x 768, you need to do as follows. Please keep in mind following steps are dependent on above mentioned steps.

  • Keep VirtualBox binaries (for instance C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox on Windows XP) under PATH variable and use the following command to change the resolution yet again.

    [bash]
    $ VBoxManage controlvm <image-name-without-suffix> setvideomodehint <xres> <yres> <bpp>

    Example:

    $ VBoxManage controlvm Ubuntu setvideomodehint 1600 1200 24
    [/bash]

  • Your screen resolution will change to 1600 x 1200 depending on the availability from monitor. You need to perform above step while VM is ON.

QuickTip: Testing Custom Constraints in Grails

· · Leave a Comment

It’s important to have test cases for your domain constraints in Grails. Sometimes, when you don’t see the availability of some constraints as Grails plugins, you would like to create one for yourself.

Testing a constraint itself is pretty straightforward as it will be a normal Groovy code. However while testing your Domain object alongwith custom constraints, I found something missing as tests were not getting executed at all. After some time, I figured out that the custom constraint need to be registered with Grails which we generally do in Config.groovy file. As Config.groovy gets executed in Grails environment and not in Unit test environment, the test itself will not run.

If you register the constraint in the setup method of test, it will work fine.. For instance if you have a custom constraint called PhoneNumberConstraint and you want to test domain which uses it, here’s what you need to do:

[groovy]
protected void setUp() {
super.setUp()
ConstrainedProperty.registerNewConstraint(PhoneNumberConstraint.NAME
, PhoneNumberConstraint.class)
}
[/groovy]