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Organizing Commands

When your shell starts to provide a lot of functionality, you may end up with a lot of commands, which could be confusing for your users. By typing help, they would see a daunting list of commands, organized in alphabetical order, which may not always be the best way to show the available commands.

To alleviate this possible confusion, Spring Shell provides the ability to group commands together, with reasonable defaults. Related commands would then end up in the same group (for example, User Management Commands) and be displayed together in the help screen and other places.

By default, commands are grouped according to the class they are implemented in, turning the camelCase class name into separate words (so URLRelatedCommands becomes URL Related Commands). This is a sensible default, as related commands are often already in the class anyway, because they need to use the same collaborating objects.

If, however, this behavior does not suit you, you can override the group for a command in the following ways, in order of priority:

  1. Specify a group() in the @ShellMethod annotation.

  2. Place a @ShellCommandGroup on the class in which the command is defined. This applies the group for all commands defined in that class (unless overridden, as explained earlier).

  3. Place a @ShellCommandGroup on the package (through package-info.java) in which the command is defined. This applies to all the commands defined in the package (unless overridden at the method or class level, as explained earlier).

The following listing shows an example:

public class UserCommands {
    @ShellMethod(value = "This command ends up in the 'User Commands' group")
    public void foo() {}

    @ShellMethod(value = "This command ends up in the 'Other Commands' group",
    	group = "Other Commands")
    public void bar() {}
}

...

@ShellCommandGroup("Other Commands")
public class SomeCommands {
	@ShellMethod(value = "This one is in 'Other Commands'")
	public void wizz() {}

	@ShellMethod(value = "And this one is 'Yet Another Group'",
		group = "Yet Another Group")
	public void last() {}
}