Global constants in Groovy

Groovy doesn't really have a global scope. When you have a groovy script that doesn't declare a class, it implicitly gets stuck in a class with the name of the script. So final variables at the top-level scope are really just fields of the implicit class. For example:

// foo.groovy
final MYCONSTANT = "foobar"
println MYCONSTANT

class Helper {
    def hello() { println MYCONSTANT }  // won't work
}
new Helper().hello()

Is more or less equivalent to:

class foo {
    def run() {
        final MYCONSTANT = "foobar"
        println MYCONSTANT
        new Helper().hello()
    }
    static main(args) {
        new foo().run()
    }
}

class Helper {
    def hello() { println MYCONSTANT }  // won't work
}

It's easy to see why it doesn't work expanded out. An easy work around is to declare your "globals" in a dummy class called e.g. Constants, and then just do a static import on it. It even works all in a single script. Example:

import static Constants.*

class Constants {
    static final MYCONSTANT = "foobar"
}

println MYCONSTANT

class Helper {
    def hello() { println MYCONSTANT } // works!
}
new Helper().hello()

EDIT:

Also, scripts are bit of a special case. If you declare a variable without def or any modifiers such as final, (i.e. just use it) it goes into a script-wide binding. So in this case:

CONSTANT = "foobar"
println "foobar"

CONSTANT is in the script-wide binding, but in:

final CONSTANT = "foobar"
println "foobar"

CONSTANT is a local variable in the script's run() method. More information on this can be found at the archived link to some Groovy - Scoping and the Semantics of "def" page.

In Groovy 1.8+, you can achieve this using the @Field annotation:

import groovy.transform.Field

@Field final String MY_CONSTANT = 'constant'

def printConstant() { println MY_CONSTANT }

printConstant()