Grails - access http data in javascript

Question

This seems like it should be simple to me but I'm struggling! I'm working on my second grails app, the first used angular.js but I can't this time around due to legacy browser requirements. I have built some of my page templates using the .gsp template hooks (g:each, g:if etc) and some JQuery to do some basic presentational stuff. The problem now is that I need to use the data that the .gsp is accessing (basic http get request along with the page load) within my JavaScript.

I could just make the controller render the data as JSON but then the grails template hooks would stop working.

I could fetch all the values from the DOM and build a local model in JS OR I could do some horrible mix-up of outputting data using .gsp g:each and then saving each one to JS inline but both processes seem ridiculous.

I could get the controller to respond with data for the .gsp AND render as JSON separately for the JS but this just seems wrong!

I'm at a loss as to how to do this, please offer any suggestions!

that's what I'm now doing after seeing Donal's reply below. It seems like going the long way round though as I'm dealing with big tables of data, so I have to be really careful with my naming. What I was hoping for was an EASY way to access the full model including all it's properties in one go, rather than having to rebuild it all from it's component parts. — bitfidget

Dónal Dónal · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-13T08:55:28

Using the simple example of an action that returns this model

def myAction() {
  [name: 'bob']
}

You basically have two choices

1. Store the data in JavaScript variables

<script type="text/javascript">
  var name = '${name}';
  // now do something with the name
</script>

2. Store the data in data- attributes

<div id="name" data-name="${name}"></div>

You can then read the name using JavaScript/jQuery

var name = $('#name').data('name');

Grails - access http data in javascript

1 Answers