What’s the best approach to work with in memory domain objects in Grails?

I’m working on a Grail’s project that has some Domain objects not persisted on the database. They are managed thru a REST API, so all their CRUD operations will be done with this API instead of the database.

The point is to still be able to use some interesting Grails plug-ins (like searching using Compass).

For instance, the administration the Domain objects Users is going to be managed with the REST API, so when the Users list is displayed a the REST method to retrieve the list of users will be invoked on the remote server. I hope this use case is clear enough :)

I can think on several ways to design that but I'm not sure what’s the best:

• Should I create the Domain Objects in the controller (and delete the previous Users stored in memory)?
• It seems it’s possible to define a Domain Class not persistable (with mapping I think) but I’m not sur开发者_开发问答e if this is the best approach or where to load the data.
• It is better not to model as a Grails the User as Domain object?

Thanks in advance!

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I would wrap the REST interactions in a service, and call the service from a controller. In that case, the service would get the response and create its objects, passing the list back to the controller. Controllers should just handle incoming requests, invoke application components, and return responses.

It seems you want models to represent the data in the other application, which is a good idea. Since you don't need GORM, you might want to define them in the 'groovy' folder of your app instead of the domain models folder. Then I think they will just be objects.

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I'd go with non-domain objects in src folder - though, need to check if it's possible to use the mentioned plugins with them.

I wonder what domain class functionality you wish to get out of non-persistent classes?