Book Image

Groovy 2 Cookbook

Book Image

Groovy 2 Cookbook

Overview of this book

Get up to speed with Groovy, a language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that integrates features of both object-oriented and functional programming. This book will show you the powerful features of Groovy 2 applied to real-world scenarios and how the dynamic nature of the language makes it very simple to tackle problems that would otherwise require hours or days of research and implementation. Groovy 2 Cookbook contains a vast number of recipes covering many facets of today's programming landscape. From language-specific topics such as closures and metaprogramming, to more advanced applications of Groovy flexibility such as DSL and testing techniques, this book gives you quick solutions to everyday problems. The recipes in this book start from the basics of installing Groovy and running your first scripts and continue with progressively more advanced examples that will help you to take advantage of the language's amazing features. Packed with hundreds of tried-and-true Groovy recipes, Groovy 2 Cookbook includes code segments covering many specialized APIs to work with files and collections, manipulate XML, work with REST services and JSON, create asynchronous tasks, and more. But Groovy does more than just ease traditional Java development: it brings modern programming features to the Java platform like closures, duck-typing, and metaprogramming. In this new book, you'll find code examples that you can use in your projects right away along with a discussion about how and why the solution works. Focusing on what's useful and tricky, Groovy 2 Cookbook offers a wealth of useful code for all Java and Groovy programmers, not just advanced practitioners.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Groovy 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Sorting XML nodes


Sometimes it is important to preserve XML data in certain order. Ordered data is easier to read and search, and some computer systems may require data they consume to be sorted. One of the most basic requirements that arise when dealing with XML is being able to sort nodes either by node value or attribute value. In this recipe, we are going to go through a couple of ways of achieving this with Groovy.

How to do it...

For this recipe, we will reuse the same XML document defined in the Searching in XML with GPath recipe.

  1. The grooviest way to sort nodes is to replace the entire element tree with a sorted one:

    import groovy.xml.XmlUtil
    def groovyMoviez = '''
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    ...
    '''
    def movieList = new XmlParser().parseText(groovyMoviez)
    movieList.value = movieList.movie.sort {
                        it.title.text()
                      }
    println XmlUtil.serialize(movieList)
  2. This will yield:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <movie-result>...