Grails 3.1.1 - Dirty checking not working when model class extends another groovy class

Question

I have a domain class which extends another groovy class with same name but in different package in a different library.

The problem is when I modify instances on the domain class, it is not marked as dirty & hence changes are not persisted.

I have read that grails 3 release has some enhancements to dirty checking & this could be a bug or I am missing something.

New objects are saved properly without any issues, I have used isDirty() method on modified domain object as well as modified properties & both return false. Objects are attached to the session, confirmed with isAttached().

To reproduce, I created a test project with following code & tried updating the object from default grails views that are generated using scaffolding, but still the changes are not persisted.

Note: I have done similar stuff in Grails 2.4 & it used to work.

Domain class is as follows:

package com.perseus

class Derived extends Base{

    static constraints = {
        name blank: false, nullable: false
    }

}

Base class in src/main/groovy:

package com.perseus

class Base implements Serializable {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L

    String name

}

Controller

package com.perseus

class DerivedController {

    static scaffold = Derived

}

Link to github project.

Isssue: Model is not marked dirty, even if it has been modified. This happens when a model class extends another groovy class.

How to reproduce:

Run the app.
Create a new model object (model name is Derived)
Modify the object using edit view & click Update.
You will see that modifications are not persisted.

There isn't enough information here to know what is wrong. There are any number of explanations for why an object might not be considered dirty after attempting to update it. — Jeff Scott Brown
I will try to reproduce it with a very small project & share a link. There is nothing much to add to be honest, my views are created using scaffolding & when I update the domain, the changes are not persisted. Give me some time, I will get back with more details. — Pritesh Mhatre
Updated the question with sample code, also gave steps to reproduce the problem & github link of the project. — Pritesh Mhatre
@NitinDhomse I reproduced the issue on a small test project shared a link of the github project, I am using scaffolding. Link: github.com/Pritesh-Mhatre/grails — Pritesh Mhatre

Pritesh Mhatre Pritesh Mhatre · Accepted Answer · 2017-12-19T09:13:34

Finally I found a reference here which explains the reason for failure to update dirty check status.

I added @DirtyCheck annotation and it solved the problem.

However this has a negative impact on the design of our libraries.

We have separate projects for each category:

Business model classes
Business logic classes
User Interface

The idea is to have modules completely independent of each other. So model & business logic liraries can be used by any UI technology. Now the problem is that I had to add gorm dependency to my business model project for the annotation.

compile 'org.grails:grails-datastore-gorm:6.1.7.RELEASE'

Design wise we like our model classes in a project completely independent of UI or persistent technologies like hibernate. So that these model classes can be used in variety of different projects without any additional dependencies. And we achieved this with grails so far by creating a new class that extends actual model class in our library

Is there any way I can solve this problem, without modifying the base class?

In short, model classes (POJO) are now dependent on grails framework, whereas in earlier versions they were not.

Grails 3.1.1 - Dirty checking not working when model class extends another groovy class

1 Answers