How to use Findall(closure) in grails project - grails

Question

I've been trying to add search functionality to my grails project and I'm running into a bit of a snag.
Here's my domain class
class Worker{
String name
}
and here's my controller
package main
class SiteController {
def search()
{
def results = Worker.findAll{
it.name ==~ /.*John.*/
}
[results:results]
}
}
I'm trying to figure out how to use the findAll(closure) function, but I can't find examples anywhere and I can't seam to figure it out via testing either, I just want to find all of the workers by the test criteria I put in the closure.
EDIT 1
I'm having another problem, for some reason whenever I use any special characters in my regex, such as [. * ?] or any of those, my findAll doesn't return anything. If I have a workers whose name is "John Smith" and I do
name ==~ /John Smith/
it works as it should, but if I use any of those special characters such as
name ==~ /John.*/
or even
name ==~ /John S.ith/
it won't work, this is very confusing and the regexs works as they should right outside the findall function too, if you could provide some insight into this that'd be very helpful

Answer 1

The example in the docs show's that you reference the attribute directly:
// Use where criteria (since Grails 2.0)
def results = Person.findAll {
lastName == "Simpson"
}
So applying to your query:
def results = Worker.findAll{
name ==~ /.*John.*/
}

Answer 2

Use LIKE in query instead, Try this:
results = Person.findAllByLastNameLike("%John%")
Grails uses hibernate underneath which uses HQL language which is similar to SQL. Alternatively, you can also run full query
results = Person.findAll("from Person as p where p.lastName LIKE :lastname order by p.lastName",
[lastname: '%John%'])
To look for into HQL queries:
http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/3.3/reference/en-US/html/queryhql.html
And it is sad but true, HQL/SQL doesn't support regular expressions, it only supports LIKE clause.