Programming Groovy 2

14.1 Method Synthesis Using methodMissing

So far we’ve been able to inject specific methods into a class or an instance. In this section, we’ll synthesize methods with flexible and dynamic names. We don’t decide the names ahead of time. In fact, we can let the users of our class decide the names as long as they follow conventions we set. When they call a nonexistent method, we can intercept it and create an implementation on the fly. The implementation is made to measure. In other words, it is created only when the users ask for it.

Method synthesis is implemented in Grails/GORM for domain classes. Suppose we have a domain class (a class that represents information persistent in a database table) ​Person​ with a number of fields (columns in ...