Using iBatis in Grails

First, quick steps for the impatient. Explanations later.

Step 1
Drop iBatis jar in lib folder of your Grails application.

Step 2
Define iBatis beans in Spring application context. In your resources.xml file add something like this:

   <bean id="ibatisTemplate" class="org.springframework.orm.ibatis.SqlMapClientTemplate">
      <property name="sqlMapClient" ref="sqlMapClient"/>
   </bean>

   <bean id="sqlMapClient" class="org.springframework.orm.ibatis.SqlMapClientFactoryBean">
      <property name="configLocation" value="classpath:ibatis/sqlmap-config.xml"/>
      <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
   </bean>

Or, if you prefer using resources.groovy:

   ibatisTemplate(org.springframework.orm.ibatis.SqlMapClientTemplate) {
      sqlMapClient = ref("sqlMapClient")
   }

   sqlMapClient(org.springframework.orm.ibatis.SqlMapClientFactoryBean) {
      configLocation = "classpath:ibatis/sqlmap-config.xml"
      dataSource = ref("dataSource")
   }

Step 3
Create iBatis configuration files in your application conf folder. For instance;

conf/ibatis/sqlmap-config.xml

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

<!DOCTYPE sqlMapConfig
    PUBLIC "-//ibatis.apache.org//DTD SQL Map Config 2.0//EN"
    "http://ibatis.apache.org/dtd/sql-map-config-2.dtd">

<sqlMapConfig>
   <settings useStatementNamespaces="true"/>
   <sqlMap resource="ibatis/Book.xml"/>
</sqlMapConfig>

conf/ibatis/Book.xml

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

<!DOCTYPE sqlMap
    PUBLIC "-//ibatis.apache.org//DTD SQL Map 2.0//EN"
    "http://ibatis.apache.org/dtd/sql-map-2.dtd">

<sqlMap namespace="Book">
   <resultMap id="result" class="Book">
      <result property="id"/>
      <result property="author"/>
      <result property="title"/>
   </resultMap>

   <select id="list" resultMap="result">
      select id, author, title from book
   </select>
</sqlMap>

Step 4
Use the ibatisTemplate bean in any Grails artifact which accepts bean injection. You even can test it in Grails shell:

   groovy:000> ctx.getBean('ibatisTemplate').queryForList('Book.list')