How can I load static content into a gsp page? - grails

Question

We have a grails project that is templated to produce two different sites. The sites have two different Frequently Asked Question pages but we would like to keep the template the same. We were thinking about including two different *.groovy files that have variables in them with the questions and then map those variables to a gsp page. Or maybe two different *.gsp files and the right one gets included at startup.
What is the best way to include the static content into the gsp page while reusing as much code as possible and how would I go about doing it?
Let me know if you need more information.

Answer 1

Grails have the concept of templates to reuse your view code. For example:
*grails-app/views/book/_bookTemplate.gsp*
<div class="book" id="${book?.id}">
<div>Title: ${book?.title}</div>
<div>Author: ${book?.author?.name}</div>
</div>
grails-app/views/book/someView.gsp
<g:render template="bookTemplate" model="[book: myBook]" />
grails-app/views/book/anotherView.gsp
<g:render template="bookTemplate" model="[book: myBook]" />
So you can use the render tag in any GSP that needs to use your template.

Answer 2

It is kind of late but I was looking for the answer myself. While there is no direct way to have insert static file in Grails, there are various ways you could accomplish so. From controller to custom tag. There is a code for custom tag:
import org.slf4j.Logger
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory
class HtmlTagLib {
// to be used in gsp like <html:render file="WEB-INF/some-static-file.txt"/>
// file param is relative to web-app folder
static namespace = 'html'
private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(HtmlTagLib .class)
def render = { attrs ->
String filePath = attrs.file
if (!filePath) {
log.error("'file' attribute must be provided")
return
}
String applicationPath = request.getSession().getServletContext().getRealPath( filePath )
def htmlContent = new File(applicationPath).text
out << htmlContent
}
}
Credits to Dónal on Rendering HTML files in Grails