Confused with weird style of groovy closures!

Help/Discuss
1

I just can’t figure out what happens when I write a property in plugin extension closure. Say, I have a sample plugin and I want to initialize some properties on plugin

sample {
prop “some prop” // what happens here? Is this calling a function with string as arg?
}

or I can also write it as

sample {
prop = “some prop” // which is just assigning value to prop
}

2

I recommend reading Groovy’s closure guide. More specifically, the sub-section about delegation strategy. There you’ll see more precisely which object is being used to find the properties and methods.

To answer your questions: yes, you’re right, but AFAIK the examples are different. In the first case, like you said, you’re calling a method called prop(String s) (either from the closure owner, or from the closure delegate). In the second case, you’re setting a property prop (which means it’s calling a different method setProp(String s)).

If the property is not found (the delegation strategy defines the search order), then I’m not exactly sure what happens, but I believe it calls a generic method setProperty(String name, Object value).

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

3

Thanks for the link jvff. It was very helpful. I have written this small program to understand the concept.

   class User {
    int age
    String name // by default field are private. Classes and methods are public
    String email
    String location
    String profession

    void name(String value){
        this.name = value
    }
    void someMethod(Closure c){
        c()
    }

}

main class

class App {

    static void main(String[] args){
        User obj = new User (name: "username", age: 21, location: "mock location", profession: "developer", email: "aaaa@gmail.com")

        def user = {
            name "allaudin" // method call, same as name(arg)
            name = "qazi" // assigned directly to field using default setter.
            println "$name, $age, $location"
            someMethod {
                println "some method called."
            }
        }
        user.delegate = obj
        user.resolveStrategy = Closure.DELEGATE_FIRST

        user()
    }
}
4

Glad I could help :slight_smile:

5

And to explain where these methods come from: Gradle adds those at runtime for every setter on a domain object. So whenever you can write foo = 'bar' you can also write foo 'bar'.

1 Like
7

That’s a nice feature that I didn’t know about. Thanks for the new tip!