Faker for Grails gives variable not defined error

问题

I have a Grails 2.4.4 application configured with spring-security-core. I want to generate fake users in the BootStrap using the faker plugin. However when I instantiate the bean fakerService in BootStrap and try using it ie. fakerService.firstname(), I get an error :

ERROR context.GrailsContextLoaderListener  - Error initializing the application: Cannot invoke method firstName() on null object
Message: Cannot invoke method firstName() on null object

I'm just a beginner in Grails. Am I doing the Dependency Injection wrong?

http://pasteboard.co/rvbihRU.png

回答1:

Yes you are :)

A little background. When you add a class-scope variable (a field) in a Groovy class without an explicit scope modifier (e.g. public, private, protected) it defaults to public just like classes and methods. But it is considered a property in the JavaBean sense, so the Groovy compiler creates a getter and a setter for you based on the name. So if you declare def foo and String bar (it doesn't matter whether you specify the type) you'll get Object getFoo(), void setFoo(Object), String getBar(), and void setBar(String) methods (you should decompile a POGO class with a decompiler and see this for yourself - it's pretty cool stuff - I recommend JD-GUI, but use whatever you prefer). If you had declared any of them already Groovy would skip that one and not overwrite yours. This is cool because you can treat the variable like a simple public field, but at any time add getter and/or setter logic and not affect calling clients (Groovy or Java, since the Java classes would have been calling the getter and setter all along, and Groovy calls the getter and setter for you when you read or write a property).

So why am I babbling on about this? Dependency injection is done by Spring - you're injecting Spring beans. There are various ways to do this, but the default in Grails is to use autoinject-by-name. So for any bean registered in the ApplicationContext and special classes like BootStrap, integration tests, etc., Spring scans the methods looking for setters. It strips off "set" and lowercases the next letter, and that's the "property" name of the setter. If there's a bean with that name in the ApplicationContext, Spring will call that setter, passing the bean with that name, and if the types are in sync, your class will have a reference to that bean.

You added a local variable. Nothing special happens to local variables, and Spring doesn't see them, and they're not candidates for dependency injection. Move the declaration to class scope, before the init closure, e.g.

class BootStrap {

   def fakerService

   def init = {
      ...
   }
}

and the Groovy compiler will add a getFakerService method that isn't of much interest, but also a setFakerService method that Spring will see. It will determine that its property name is "fakerService", see that there is a bean with that name, and call the setter. This all happens before Grails calls the init closure, so at that point the value will be a non-null FakerService eagerly awaiting your calls.

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28007701/faker-for-grails-gives-variable-not-defined-error