Q:

one-off grails script for populating database

Update: as of Grails 1.3.6 one has access to the full domain from Gant scripts.
From the Grails 1.3.6 release notes:
You can now run one or more Groovy scripts from the commandline using the run-script command, e.g.
grails run-script [path-to-script-1] [path-to-script-2]...[path-to-script-n]
This works around the issue in Gant scripts where you can't conveniently access application classes since they're not available in the classpath when the scripts start. 

Hi all,
I am new to using Grails (in a real project) and I have a one-off script I need to execute that reads a file and then populates my database.
I wanted the script to run in the context of my grails app, so I used the create-script command. I now understand that makes it a 'Gant' script. The reason for doing so was that I thought it would allow me easy access to all the grails domain good-ness, so that i would be able to do something like this easily:
Car car = new Car(model: 'bar', brand: 'Ford')
car.save()

Here, Car is one of my domain classes and the strings 'bar' and 'Ford' I have retrieved from my file.
The start of my script looks like this:
import com.foo.Car    
grailsHome = Ant.project.properties."environment.GRAILS_HOME"
includeTargets << new File ( "${grailsHome}/scripts/Bootstrap.groovy" )
target(main: "a script for storing cars") {
    depends(bootstrap, classpath) // code dealing with the file with cars follows

Surprisingly, groovy gives me a java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com.foo.Car when I execute the script with the command grails LoadCars
Am I taking the wrong approach, or is there something more simple I am doing wrong?
Any help is appreciated

A:

i know the scripts are useful, and I will probably get hate mail for even suggesting it, but I have just incorporating this kinda of stuff directly into my application in the past.
I have a flag set in my configuration which indicates if the data should be bootstrapped, if so, the bootstrap code looks for a comma delimited file at startup and calls a service method to load up the data.

A:

I've updated the grails run-script Gant script (referred to by Jared above) to work with grails 1.3.5.  I'd been meaning to do it for a while, but this question nudged me into finally getting around to it).
Just download the script described in the post, save it in your grails "scripts" directory and you can then run your own groovy script to bootstrap data with:
grails run-script script-path/boostrapMyDataIntoApp.groovy

