Some may know the problem called object slicing when passing or assigning polymorphic objects by value in C++. The issue is not limited to C++ as we experienced recently in one of our web application based on Grails. If you are curious just stay awhile and listen…

Our setting

Some of our domain entities use inheritance and their containing entities determine what to do using some properties. You may call that bad design but for now let us take it as it is and show some code to clarify the situation:

@Entity
class Container {
  private A a

  def doSomething() {
    if (hasActuallyB()) {
      return a.bMethod()
    }
    return a.something()
  }
}

@Entity
class A {

  def something() {
    return 'Something A does'
  }
}

@Entity
class B extends A {

  def bMethod() {
    return 'Something only B can do'
  }
}

class ContainerController {

  def save = {
    new Container(b: new B()).save()
  }

  def show = {
    def container = Container.get(params.id)
    [result: container.doSomething()]
  }
}

Such code worked for us without problems in until we upgraded to Grails 3. Suddenly we got exceptions like:

2019-02-18 17:03:43.370 ERROR --- [nio-8080-exec-1] o.g.web.errors.GrailsExceptionResolver   : MissingMethodException occurred when processing request: [GET] /container/show
No signature of method: A.bMethod() is applicable for argument types: () values: []. Stacktrace follows:

Caused by: groovy.lang.MissingMethodException: No signature of method: A.bMethod() is applicable for argument types: () values: []
at Container.doSomething(Container.groovy:123)

Debugging showed our assumptions and checks were still true and the Container member was saved correctly as a B. Still the groovy method call using duck typing did not work…

What is happening here?

Since the domain entities are persistent objects mapped by GORM and (in our case) Hibernate they do not always behave like your average POGO (plain old groovy object). They may in reality be Javassist proxy instances when fetched from the database. These proxies are set up to respond to the declared type and not the actual type of the member! Clearly, an A does not respond to the bMethod().

A workaround

Ok, the class hierarchy is not that great but we cannot rewrite everything. So what now?

Fortunately there is a workaround: You can explicitly unwrap the proxy object using GrailsHibernateUtil.unwrapIfProxy() and you have a real instance of B and your groovy duck typing and polymorphic calls work as expected again.