JT’s Blog

Grails FilterPane Plugin Review

Yesterday I started using the FilterPane plugin.  So far, I am very impressed with the plugin. I have a number of screens in my application that I needed to provide some basic search functionality for.  I had previously looked at the Criteria plugin and found it so so.

It probably took me an hour or so to research the documentation and example of the FilterPane plugin, my actual development time was under 15 minutes to get things up an running in my project.  I found the documentation very thorough and the example project helpful.

To get the plugin working, started with a basic list.gsp view generated from the default Grails scaffolding.  Following the plugin’s directions, I modified the list view with several new tags & I had to modify some of the existing tags.  The view controller gets a new ‘filterService’ service and one new method.

The only thing that tripped me up was I had to use the fully qualified name of the domain object.  Initially, I did not include the package name of the domain object, and things did not work.

I added the filter to my Purchase Order domain, which is probably one of my more complex domain classes.  The default setup from the directions, gives you a ‘filter’ button at the bottom of the list view.

Clicking the filter button shows the filter dialog in a nice Web 2.0 fashion.  If you include scriptaculous in your page, you’ll get a nice fade in / out affect.  Here is an example of the filter dialog.  Note, this is all generated by the plugin.  The code I wrote to provide this is:

<filterpane:filterPane domainBean="org.whserat.PurchaseOrder" />

In this example, I asked for PO’s where the PO number contained ‘3′.  Here is the result:

I like the message provided showing the criteria applied.  This is a nice, user friendly feature.

Overall, I’m impressed with this plugin.  I really like the capabilities it adds to my application.  I’m considering adding this into by default scaffolding views.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 9th, 2010 at 8:07 am and is filed under Uncategorized. The entry is tagged under filterPane, Grails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.