Show GSP directly in Grails 2

Starting Grails 2.0, you cannot access GSP's directly when you type it in the url without defining it in url mappings. It has been disallowed since it's considered a security flaw of Grails 1.x. The side-effect is for simple static pages, it's a hassle to create mappings everytime.

Fortunately, Grails allows a simple workaround by using the UrlMappings.groovy. You just need to define one controller and make its actions accessible in url mappings configuration.

These are the steps I followed to quickly see all my root pages:

1. Create a StaticViewController
2. My UrlMappings.groovy contains:
    "/"(controller:"staticView")
    "/$action"(controller:"staticView")

Creating a controller is my preferred way, it's an additional step but my views are more manageable this way. 

For this example, I defined the following in my StaticViewController:

def index() {

}

def hello() {
}

Then added the ff gsps:

views/staticView/index.gsp

views/staticView/hello.gsp

I can now access the following in my browser:

http://localhost:8080/[app]/

http://localhost:8080/[app]/hello

To make your urls more search engine friendly, you may also want to map urls that ends in "html" to your controller, just add this line in UrlMappings.groovy :
"/*.html"(controller:"staticView")

In this case, I'll be able to access:
http://localhost:8080/[app]/hello.html

---
src: http://grails.1312388.n4.nabble.com/Direct-linking-to-gsp-in-Grails-2-0-td4228929.html