We (the Pleasanton, CA based Teletrac Navman team) had an exciting day yesterday with two volunteering events at the Open Heart Kitchen.

First one was helping out at the Robert Livermore Community Center, serving lunch to the elderly. The second was packaging 2700+ brown bag lunches for kids. Was a lot of fun, and big thanks to our Pleasanton, CA based volunteering team!

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So I’m still in learning mode w/Groovy & Grails, and I have basic CRUD for managing users. The user domain class has the properties that you’d expect, including a FirstName and LastName:

class User
{
  String firstName
  String lastName
}

So I wanted to create a simple right side wildcard search that would effectively be the same as this in SQL Server:

where (firstName like '#searchTerm#%' or lastName like '#searchTerm#%')

In Grails you have a wrapper around Hibernate called GORM, which provides a mechanism called Dynamic Finders.

Imagine if you had to write a collection of functions for finding and retrieving one or many records based on each property (findByFirstName(), findAllByFirstName(), findFirstNameLike(), findByAgeGreaterThan(), etc…), it could take awhile. 🙂

But with GORM, it’s as if a little elf in the middle of the night coded all night long to create these functions for you. You never see them, but they’re magically there!

There’s a whole “with criteria” mechanism and the Hibernate Query Language (HQL), but I found the simplest way was just to do this:

def userList =

User.findAllByFirstNameLikeOrLastNameLike("${params.searchTerm}%",
"${params.searchTerm}%")