Overriding plugin views in Grails 2.2 - grails

Question

I'm trying to customize the HTML markup of the excellent FilterPane grails plugin, however I'm having some difficulty. FilterPane provides a bunch of tags for rendering the search/filter form, and I would like to override these in my application.
I had thought that I could simply copy the _tagName.gsps that I wanted to override from
plugins/filterpane-2.0.1.1/grails-app/views/filterpane
into
grails-app/views/filterpane
and modify them, however it looks like Grails never checks whether the application is overriding the views of a plugin, if the render method is called with a plugin name property specified.
org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.pages.GroovyPagesTemplateRenderer.findAndCacheTemplate contains the following code in a private method:
...
GroovyPageScriptSource scriptSource;
if (pluginName == null) {
scriptSource = groovyPageLocator.findTemplateInBinding(templatePath, pageScope);
} else {
scriptSource = groovyPageLocator.findTemplateInBinding(pluginName, templatePath, pageScope);
}
...
so when a non-null pluginName is specified, we just grab the plugin's view and never check whether the application is overriding it.
I thought a simple way to get around this problem would be to just override GrailsConventionGroovyPageLocator.findTemplateInBinding, or some other similar method in GrailsConventionGroovyPageLocator, however it doesn't appear to be possible to do this from within a Grails application either!
I created a simple class overriding GrailsConventionGroovyPageLocator, replacing the findTemplateInBinding method with one that checks the application's view directory before checking that of the plugin. I then modified resources.groovy, adding a doWithSpring closure to replace the beanClass property of the default groovyPageLocator:
def doWithSpring = {
def pageLocator = delegate.getBeanDefinition("groovyPageLocator")
pageLocator.beanClass = MyConventionGroovyPageLocator
}
However this doesn't seem to be called when my application starts up.
I'm really at a loss here. I'd expected this to be straightforward, but it's turned into a bit of a can of worms. Does anyone have any suggestions? All I want to do is override the views provided by a plugin...

Answer 1

You can modify the plugin source, instead of changing the location of the template.
The location is: user_home\.grails\version\projects\project\plugins\plugin-name

Answer 2

I am not a grails expert, but in order to override plugin views you should recreate them in your main projects views folder. For example, I changed the /auth/login.gsp from Spring Security Plugin by simply creating the same thing in my /project/views/auth/login.gsp. If you make changes into the plugin files itself you could potentially lose them if you uninstall the plugin.

Answer 3

In order to change a view in a template of a plugin, perform the command
grails install-templates
source
This will copy the templates of the plugins to your project which you then can customize. What this does with for example the scaffolding plugin, is copy files to src/templates/scaffolding (note, not grails-app/templates/scaffolding). Therefore, in your case, I would try copying the files to src/views/filterpane