As I have just started out with Grails I am still not that familiar with what Grails is doing in the background, no matter how obvious it might be. One such case is the initialization of the application context. I recently created a (RESTful) controller that uses a service. As the RESTful side of things is not currently secured, no context initialization (or service initialization) is performed. I will be looking at securing things shortly so that may change the state of affairs but for the moment, I need to initialize my service in Bootstrap.groovy:
class BootStrap {
// declare service if used outside the context of the running application
def someService
def init = { servletContext ->
...
Otherwise, I get something like:
Method on class [Person] was used outside of a Grails application.
If running in the context of a test using the mocking API or bootstrap Grails correctly.
The reference to testing is a good hint - something that would normally be initialized by Grails has not yet been initialized!
