Uploading photos using Grails Services

Question

I would like to ask, What would be the most suitable scope for my upload photo service in Grails ? I created this PhotoService in my Grails 2.3.4 web app, all it does is to get the request.getFile("myfile") and perform the necessary steps to save it on the hard drive whenever a user wants to upload an image. To illustrate what it looks like, I give a skeleton of these classes.

PhotoPageController {

    def photoService

    def upload(){
       ...
       photoService.upload(request.getFile("myfile"))
       ...
    }
}

PhotoService{

     static scope="request"
     def upload(def myFile){
        ...
        // I do a bunch of task to save the photo 
        ...
     }
}

The code above isn't the exact code, I just wanted to show the flow. But my question is:

Question: I couldn't find the exact definition of these different grails scopes, they have a one liner explanation but I couldn't figure out if request scope means for every request to the controller one bean is injected, or each time a request comes to upload action of the controller ?

Thoughts: Basically since many users might upload at the same time, It's not a good idea to use singleton scope, so my options would be prototype or request I guess. So which one of them works well and also which one only gets created when the PhotoService is accessed only ?

I'm trying to minimize the number of services being injected into the application context and stays as long as the web app is alive, basically I want the service instance to die or get garbage collect at some point during the web app life time rather than hanging around in the memory while there is no use for it. I was thinking about making it session scope so when the user's session is terminated the service is cleaned up too, but in some cases a user might not want to upload any photo and the service gets created for no reason.

P.S: If I move the "def photoService" within the upload(), does that make it only get injected when the request to upload is invoked ? I assume that might throw exception because there would be a delay until Spring injects the service and then the ref to def photoService would be n

Answer 1

I figured out that Singleton scope would be fine since I'm not maintaining the state for each request/user. Only if the service is supposed to maintain state, then we can go ahead and use prototype or other suitable scopes. Using prototype is safer if you think the singleton might cause unexpected behavior but that is left to testing.