I\'m currently developing a menu for my application that should be able to display only the controllers that the current user can access (requestmap defined in the database).
This question is pretty old, but I thought I'd post at least an answer that seems to work with Grails 2.0. If you are using the spring security plugin, there's a tag lib included called grails.plugins.springsecurity.SecurityTagLib.
The tag-lib has a protected method, hasAccess() which can take the same params map that you give the g:link tag. So, if you extend SecurityTagLib, you can call hasAccess() and get the behavior you want. Why this isn't externalized into a service that can be injected is beyond me as the functionality seems to fulfill an obvious need.
We use this to wrap the g:link tag and only generate a link of the user has access to the target page:
def link = { attrs, body ->
if( hasAccess(attrs.clone(), "link") ) {
out << g.link(attrs, body)
}
else {
out << body()
}
}