Populating a select box in Grails with values from database

Posted by: nerdgerl on: August 20, 2009

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A fairly common requirement is to populate values in a select box/drop down box with values from a database. It’s quick and easy to do in Grails.

1. Inside your Contorller, create your query in the closure associated with your view. Eg. I’m going to create a new object that contains a list of values from that database and return it to the search.gsp view:

def search = {
  def authors = Book.executeQuery("SELECT distinct b.author FROM Book b")
  [authors : authors]
}

2. Inside your search.gsp, add a select box that displays the list of countries:
   

   <g:select id="authorSelection" name="author" from="${authors}" value="" noSelection="['':'Please Select...']> 

3. When you are reading the value back out of the form in your controller, simply use:
   

   params.author

4. You’re done! Easy peasy.

EDIT: I recently found an official looking tutorial about how to do selects with grails here.

Tags: code, grails