Customizing dynamic scaffolding views

Let me open this first post by apologizing in advance for the silly things I will write over the coming months. I expect a good proportion of the posts I make on this blog will report things that were a secret to me but not to anyone else. This will likely happen because I,

• Fail to read the correct piece of documentation, or,
  
• Mis-read the appropriate documentation, or,
  
• Search the mailing lists and Jira with the wrong keywords, or,
• Lack talent and basic common sense

Without further ado lets dive into the first secret I've stumbled upon.

I'm writing a Grails read-only front end to a legacy database. I have written a proprietary security plug-in and I'm pretty happy that my application will not allow update or other unauthorized access to the database. I have dozens of tables mapped to Grails domain classes and the dynamic scaffolding feature that lets me not have to generate and maintain views saves me a huge amount of work.

However, the dynamic scaffolding views contain buttons that purport to allow users to add, update and delete data. My security plug-in won't let them do any database updates but it is a bit ugly having these superfluous buttons everywhere. As I really did not want to generate and then edit views for each domain class I started to search around.

Fairly quickly I stumbled upon this bit of code in the Package.groovy build script,

target(packageTemplates: "Packages templates into the app") {
--Ant.mkdir(dir:scaffoldDir)
--if(new File("${basedir}/src/templates/scaffolding").exists()) {
----Ant.copy(todir:scaffoldDir, overwrite:true) {
------fileset(dir:"${basedir}/src/templates/scaffolding", includes:"**")
----}
--}
--else {
----Ant.copy(todir:scaffoldDir, overwrite:true) {
------fileset(dir:"${grailsHome}/src/grails/templates/scaffolding", includes:"**")
----}
--}
}

How cool is this. By taking a copy of of the default dynamic scaffolding views in the Grails src directory and putting them in my own src directory I was able to create my own customized dynamic scaffolding views which did not contain add, update or delete buttons.

Mission accomplished! Thank you Grails guys and girls for such a neat feature.