Grails partial validation of domain objects

I found this funky little feature in Grails the other day. Partial validation of domain objects. If you are fortunate enough to be developing an application that's domain model can be designed in a way that closely models your required screens (say a bunch of GRUD screens) then this feature will probably be of little interest to you. However if like me you are finding that the default Grails CRUD type approach is not flexible enough for your requirements check this out!

I am developing a web flow application that will populate a domain object (the user is filling in an application form) across multiple controllers and or actions. At each stage of the flow I am wanting to only validate the properties which the current action is charged with binding.

Lets say this is my domain object

class Application {

  String firstName
  String lastName
  String emailAddress
  Date dateOfBirth
  String sex

  String address1
  String address2
  String address3
  String address4

  //etc..

  static constraints = {
     firstName(blank:true)
     lastName(blank:true)
     emailAddress(email:true)
     dateOfBirth(nullable:false)
     sex(inList:["Male", "Female"])
     address1(blank:false)
     address2(blank:false)
     address3(blank:false)
     address4(blank:false)
  }
}

I would like to populate this domain across three controller actions. To do this I just need to pass a map of property names to the "validate" method of the domain object. Yep, its as simple as that!

//...action1
applicationInstance.validate(['firstName', 'lastName', 'emailAddress'])

//...action2
applicationInstance.validate(['dateOfBirth', 'sex'])

//...action3
applicationInstance.validate(['address1', 'address2', 'address3', 'address4'])