Groovy annotations for ToString and EqualsAndHashCode

As I am a lazy programmer most of the time I dont implement toString and equals methods on my grails domain classes. I would like to say thanks to Groovy for helping me out and giving me a ready made recipe for this. Now I just need to annotate my class with ToString and EqualAndHashCode annotation it adds appropriate implementation of these methods for me. Now My domain class looks something like this.

[java]
@ToString(includeNames = true, includeFields = true, excludes = ‘dateCreated,lastUpdated,metaClass’)
@EqualsAndHashCode
class Item {
String name
Float price
boolean active = true
Date dateCreated
Date lastUpdated
}
[/java]

Before adding this annotation my domain class toString looks like this

[java]
Item item = new Item(name: "Chips", active: false, price: 15)
println "To String output -: " + item //To String output -: com.intelligrape.myapp.Item : null
[/java]

Now I get the following output for Item object toString

[java]
Item item = new Item(name: "Chips", active: false, price: 15)
println "To String output -: " + item //To String output -: com.intelligrape.myapp.Item(name:Chips, price:15.0, active:false)
[/java]

To get this annotation on all my domain classed I updated the template of grails domain classes so that whenever I do create-domain-class it give me the annotated domain classes

[java]
@artifact.package@
import groovy.transform.EqualsAndHashCode
import groovy.transform.ToString

@ToString(includeNames = true, includeFields = true, excludes = ‘dateCreated,lastUpdated,metaClass’)
@EqualsAndHashCode
class @artifact.name@ {

Date dateCreated
Date lastUpdated
}
[/java]

Hope it helps
Uday Pratap Singh
uday@intelligrape.com