Grails class names

Seems like there are many flavors of the name for a Grails class:

• fullName — Returns the full name of the class in the application with the the trailing convention part and with the package name
• name — Returns the logical name of the class in the application without the trailing convention part if applicable and without the package name.
• naturalName — Returns the name of the property in natural terms (eg. ‘lastName’ becomes ‘Last Name’)
• shortName — Returns the short name of the class without package prefix
• propertyName — Returns the name of the class as a property name
• logicalPropertyName — Returns the logical name of the class as a property name

These are from http://grails.org/doc/2.2.x/api/org/codehaus/groovy/grails/commons/GrailsClass.html.  It looks like somebody just typed in something just to have something show up in Javadoc.

A pause in the code to show an example is probably the best way to document these names.  For a class like com.blah.UserManagementController:

• fullName: com.blah.UserManagementController
• name: UserManagement
• naturalName: User Management Controller
• shortName: UserManagementController
• propertyName: userManagementController
• logicalPropertyName: userManagement

Now that that’s out of the way, notes:

Spring’s application context (e.g. grailsApplication.mainContext) holds on to its beans using names that may not be obvious. The easiest way to figure out is to fire up

grails console

and evaluate:

grailsApplication.mainContext.getBeanDefinitionNames()

and find the bean’s name.