If we have a action method in our controller and we want to create a corresponding GSP we can press Alt+Enter when the cursor is on the action method. IDEA shows the intention actions and one of them is Create view (GSP page).
We select this option and IntelliJ IDEA creates a view with the name of our action in the directory grails-app/views/{controllerName}:
Written with Grails 3.0.10 and IntelliJ IDEA 15.
Normally in a Grails application we have classes that are related to each other, but are located in different directories. For example a controller with several views. Or a Grails service with corresponding specifications. In IntelliJ IDEA we can use Choose Target and IDEA will show classes, files and methods that are relevant for the current file we are editing. The keybinding on my Mac OSX is Ctrl+Cmd+Up, but can be different on your computer and operating system. We can also choose the menu option Navigate | Related symbol....
In the following example we are editing the file MessagesController. We select the action Choose Target, IntelliJ IDEA shows a popup menu with the views for this controller and the specification class:
Or if we are editing a view and select the menu option Navigate | Related symbol.... Now we can navigate to the controller, method in the controller and other views:
Written with Grails 3.0.10 and IntelliJ IDEA 15.
In the latest Grails releases we can execute our tests in so-called forked mode. This means a separate JVM is started with an isolated classpath from the Grails build system. When we want to run our tests in forked mode from within IntelliJ IDEA we get the following error: Error running forked test-app: Could not load grails build listener class (Use --stacktrace to see the full trace). To make running tests in forked mode work with IntelliJ IDEA we must add one of the IntelliJ IDEA supplied JAR files to the Grails classpath.
We need to search for the file grails-rt.jar in the directory where we installed IntelliJ IDEA. For example on Mac OSX this would be Applications/IntelliJ IDEA 13.app/plugins/Grails/lib/grails-rt.jar. We need to copy this file to the lib directory of our Grails project. On *nix systems we can actually define a soft link to this location in the lib directory. For example with the following command $ ln -s /Applications/IntelliJ\ IDEA\ 13.app/plugins/Grails/lib/grails-rt.jar lib/intellij-grails-rt.jar.
Now we can run our Grails forked tests from within IntelliJ IDEA. To debug our tests we must add the option --debug-fork to the Run Configuration of the test.
We could also disable the forked mode for tests to run them in IntelliJ IDEA. We must then set grails.project.fork.test = false in grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy. In non-forked mode we don't need to copy the file grails-rt.jar.
Tested with IntelliJ IDEA 13 and Grails 2.3.5.