17.3 Encoding and Decoding Objects

Grails supports the concept of dynamic encode/decode methods. A set of standard codecs are bundled with Grails. Grails also supports a simple mechanism for developers to contribute their own codecs that will be recognized at runtime.

Codec Classes

A Grails codec class is one that may contain an encode closure, a decode closure or both. When a Grails application starts up the Grails framework dynamically loads codecs from the grails-app/utils/ directory.

The framework looks under grails-app/utils/ for class names that end with the convention Codec. For example one of the standard codecs that ships with Grails is HTMLCodec.

If a codec contains an encode closure Grails will create a dynamic encode method and add that method to the Object class with a name representing the codec that defined the encode closure. For example, the HTMLCodec class defines an encode closure, so Grails attaches it with the name encodeAsHTML.

The HTMLCodec and URLCodec classes also define a decode closure, so Grails attaches those with the names decodeHTML and decodeURL respectively. Dynamic codec methods may be invoked from anywhere in a Grails application. For example, consider a case where a report contains a property called 'description' which may contain special characters that must be escaped to be presented in an HTML document. One way to deal with that in a GSP is to encode the description property using the dynamic encode method as shown below:

${report.description.encodeAsHTML()}

Decoding is performed using value.decodeHTML() syntax.

Encoder and Decoder interfaces for staticly compiled code

A preferred way to use codecs is to use the codecLookup bean to get hold of Encoder and Decoder instances .

package org.grails.encoder;
public interface CodecLookup {
    public Encoder lookupEncoder(String codecName);
    public Decoder lookupDecoder(String codecName);
}

example of using CodecLookup and Encoder interface

import org.grails.encoder.CodecLookup
class CustomTagLib {
    CodecLookup codecLookup
    def myTag = { Map attrs, body ->
        out << codecLookup.lookupEncoder('HTML').encode(attrs.something)
    }
}

Standard Codecs

HTMLCodec

This codec performs HTML escaping and unescaping, so that values can be rendered safely in an HTML page without creating any HTML tags or damaging the page layout. For example, given a value "Don’t you know that 2 > 1?" you wouldn’t be able to show this safely within an HTML page because the > will look like it closes a tag, which is especially bad if you render this data within an attribute, such as the value attribute of an input field.

Example of usage:

<input name="comment.message" value="${comment.message.encodeAsHTML()}"/>

HTMLCodec defaults to HTML4 style escaping (legacy HTMLCodec implementation in Grails versions before 2.3.0) which escapes non-ascii characters.

You can use plain XML escaping instead of HTML4 escaping by setting this config property in application.groovy:

grails.views.gsp.htmlcodec = 'xml'

XMLCodec

This codec performs XML escaping and unescaping. It escapes & , < , > , " , ' , \\ , @ , ` , non breaking space (\\u00a0), line separator (\\u2028) and paragraph separator (\\u2029).

HTMLJSCodec

This codec performs HTML and JS encoding. It is used for preventing some DOM-XSS vulnerabilities. See OWASP - DOM based XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet for guidelines of preventing DOM based XSS attacks.

URLCodec

URL encoding is required when creating URLs in links or form actions, or any time data is used to create a URL. It prevents illegal characters from getting into the URL and changing its meaning, for example "Apple & Blackberry" is not going to work well as a parameter in a GET request as the ampersand will break parameter parsing.

Example of usage:

<a href="/mycontroller/find?searchKey=${lastSearch.encodeAsURL()}">
Repeat last search
</a>

Base64Codec

Performs Base64 encode/decode functions. Example of usage:

Your registration code is: ${user.registrationCode.encodeAsBase64()}

JavaScriptCodec

Escapes Strings so they can be used as valid JavaScript strings. For example:

Element.update('${elementId}',
    '${render(template: "/common/message").encodeAsJavaScript()}')

HexCodec

Encodes byte arrays or lists of integers to lowercase hexadecimal strings, and can decode hexadecimal strings into byte arrays. For example:

Selected colour: #${[255,127,255].encodeAsHex()}

MD5Codec

Uses the MD5 algorithm to digest byte arrays or lists of integers, or the bytes of a string (in default system encoding), as a lowercase hexadecimal string. Example of usage:

Your API Key: ${user.uniqueID.encodeAsMD5()}

MD5BytesCodec

Uses the MD5 algorithm to digest byte arrays or lists of integers, or the bytes of a string (in default system encoding), as a byte array. Example of usage:

byte[] passwordHash = params.password.encodeAsMD5Bytes()

SHA1Codec

Uses the SHA1 algorithm to digest byte arrays or lists of integers, or the bytes of a string (in default system encoding), as a lowercase hexadecimal string. Example of usage:

Your API Key: ${user.uniqueID.encodeAsSHA1()}

SHA1BytesCodec

Uses the SHA1 algorithm to digest byte arrays or lists of integers, or the bytes of a string (in default system encoding), as a byte array. Example of usage:

byte[] passwordHash = params.password.encodeAsSHA1Bytes()

SHA256Codec

Uses the SHA256 algorithm to digest byte arrays or lists of integers, or the bytes of a string (in default system encoding), as a lowercase hexadecimal string. Example of usage:

Your API Key: ${user.uniqueID.encodeAsSHA256()}

SHA256BytesCodec

Uses the SHA256 algorithm to digest byte arrays or lists of integers, or the bytes of a string (in default system encoding), as a byte array. Example of usage:

byte[] passwordHash = params.password.encodeAsSHA256Bytes()

Custom Codecs

Applications may define their own codecs and Grails will load them along with the standard codecs. A custom codec class must be defined in the grails-app/utils/ directory and the class name must end with Codec. The codec may contain a static encode closure, a static decode closure or both. The closure must accept a single argument which will be the object that the dynamic method was invoked on. For Example:

class PigLatinCodec {
  static encode = { str ->
    // convert the string to pig latin and return the result
  }
}

With the above codec in place an application could do something like this:

${lastName.encodeAsPigLatin()}