Having trouble installing the Quartz plugin? Read on...

For those of you who don't follow the grails-users list, I thought I'd post a quick solution to solving an odd-looking compile error when installing the Quartz plugin into a Grails application that also uses the JSecurity plugin.
The compile error you will see is:

GrailsJobFactory.java:75: cannot find symbol
symbol  : constructor JobExecutionException(java.lang.String,java.lang.Exception)
location: class org.quartz.JobExecutionException
    throw new JobExecutionException(e.getMessage(), e);

It's caused by a library clash between the two plugins as JSecurity also ships with quartz.jar. Luckily (according to Les from the JSecurity project), JSecurity doesn't actually rely on that jar so you can delete it from plugins/jsecurity-x.x/lib which will solve the compile issue.

Grafton Hillclimb

I attended the Grafton Sporting Car Club's hillclimb on the weekend for the first time. It was loads of fun, and the first time I had my car out on a track. I managed to get under 60 seconds which was my goal for the day but hope to be a lot closer to the Evo's next time. I headed down with some top blokes from EvoOz and made a weekend of it. I can't wait to go back with improved suspension and tires, I just need to develop the business case in order to get it past the Minister for Finance. I think I'll try the improved safety angle... You can see how tight and technical the track is below.

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This is a shot taken by Nigel from Unique Images. Thanks a lot Nigel!

I feature at around 2:30 and 7:00 in the below video - great camera work/commentary by 'Pres' from EvoOz.

Jasper Reports Grails Plugin - sub-reports

Here's something that tripped me up when developing my first JasperReport containing a sub-report for use with the JasperReport grails plugin. In order for the sub-report to resolve correctly you need to add a parameter to your parent report called SUBREPORT_DIR. This is then set by the JR plugin, and makes everything work as expected. When specifying the sub-report location, set it to

$P{SUBREPORT_DIR}  + "mysubreport.jasper"

(assuming your subreport is in the same directory as the parent report and called mysubreport.jasper) Don't forget to give the parameter a default value of empty string so that it still works when previewing in iReport. You also need to remember that the plugin runs the compiled versions (*.jasper not *.jrxml) so you need to compile the reports with iReport before running the application.

Jasper Reports Grails Plugin Gotcha

Thought I'd blog this quickly: If you're using iReport to develop reports for use with the Jasper Reports grails plugin, make sure you download the version that matches the version of Jasper that the plugin uses (currently 2.0.5). Otherwise you get terribly unhelpful exceptions like:

java.lang.NullPointerException
 at net.sf.jasperreports.engine.JRPropertiesMap.readObject(JRPropertiesMap.java:185)