Gravatars on a Grails Application

Building out my new site in Grails I needed the ability to show a Gravatar in the comments. I know there are usually plugins out there but I there are a lot of things I am going to do on my own just so I have an excuse to blog about them. First off visit the Gravatar docs to get an idea of how to request an image. This is what the finished product is going to look like.  The most basic image request URL looks like this:

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/HASH

where HASH is replaced with the calculated hash for the specific email address you are requesting. For example, here is my base URL:

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/205e460b479e2e5b48aec07710c08d50

If you look at the docs there are ways to customize the size and default image if an account is not found. There are a couple different approaches we can take but this is the route I decided to go. Since a comment is just going to be inserted why not store the email hash in the db. We have an easy way of doing this with GORM events. On insert I am going to get the MD5hash of the email address and store it.

package com.vega.blog

class Comment {

    String name
    String email
    String emailHash
    String website
    String content
    Boolean subscribe = false
    Date dateCreated

    static belongsTo = \[post:Post\]

    static constraints = {
        emailHash nullable: true
    }

    static mapping = {
        sort dateCreated: 'desc'
    }

    // event handlers
    def beforeInsert(){
        emailHash = email.encodeAsMD5()
    }

}

That is really all there is to it. Now we can call ${comment.emailHash} and grab that value right from the db. Here is what the final comments template looks like.

<div class="comments well">
    <div class="title">
        <h4>${post.comments.size()} Comments</h4>
    </div>
    <a name="comments"></a><a name="${comment.id}"></a>
    <ul class="comment-list">
        <li class="comment"><img class="avatar pull-left" title="${comment.name}" src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/${comment.emailHash}?s=64&amp;r=pg&amp;d=mm" alt="" />
            <div class="comment-author">${comment.name} <a title="permalink" href="#">#</a></div>
            <div class="cmeta">Commented on ${comment.dateCreated.format('MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm')}</div>
            ${comment.content}
            <div class="clearfix"></div>
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>
<div class="clear"></div>