GORM : Relationship table not updated in many-to-many mapping - grails

Question

I have two domain classes (simplified) which are related by a Many-to-Many relationship.
A Team can have many Players and a Player can belong to many Teams.
When i call the 'save' action of the Team controller :
A player gets saved in the table. (as expected)
A Team gets saved in the table. (as expected)
When i print team.players and player.teams, i see the correct output (See code below)
Nothing is saved in the relationship table (TEAM_PLAYERS). Why is this happening? Do i need to make entries in the join table myself? If this table is not getting updated, how am i seeing the correct output for point 3. ?
Team.groovy is :
class Team {
static hasMany = [players : Player]
String name;
String size;
}
Player.groovy is :
class Player {
static hasMany = [teams : Team]
static belongsTo = Team
String fullName;
String age;
}
TeamController.groovy is :
class TeamController {
def save() {
def player = new Player(fullName : "John Doe", age : "21").save()
def team = new Team(name : "LocalXI", size : "1").addToPlayers(player).save();
println "The players in the team are : " + team.players
println "The teams this player belongs to are : " + player.teams
}
}
Output for the above (when i call 'save' action ) :
The players in the team are : [John Doe]
The teams this player belongs to are : [LocalXI]
I am new to Grails and Groovy and have spent a lot of time trying to figure this out.

Answer 1

It should work. Take into consideration that the save method is transactional by default and it won't actually persist the data until the method is finished. Within the transaction everything looks correct, that is why the println output is correct.
If you are testing this controller via integration test, your data won't be persisted as the transaction is rolled back automatically for each test.
If you are testing this manually via browser make sure your are not using an in-memory DB in your current runtime environment.