Entries for month: May 2008
Transfer ORM Event Model Examples - BeforeCreate and BeforeUpdate
Posted by Paul Marcotte | Tags: Learning , Transfer
The topic of how one might track created and modified dates came up on the transfer list today and Brian Kotek mentioned how he uses the transfer event model to track changes when creating or updating Transfer objects. I thought it might be interesting to see just how easy it would be to implement his approach.CAVEAT LECTOR I rushed this post out without thinking through the implementation. This is an incorrect and possibly dangerous way to use the transfer event model. Please see Bob Silverberg's post on this topic.
I define a configure() method within all of my transfer decorators. Configure() is invoked when a transfer object is instantiated. This makes it a perfect candidate to add additional behaviour by registering the Transfer object to listen for specific events. In this example I'll setup the transfer object to listen for the BeforeCreate and BeforeUpdate events.<cffunction name="configure" access="public" output="false" returntype="void">
<!--- register for transfer events --->
<cfset getTransfer().addBeforeCreateObserver(this)>
<cfset getTransfer().addBeforeUpdateObserver(this)>
</cffunction>
Once registered for these events, the Transfer object must implement the following methods.
<cffunction name="actionBeforeCreateTransferEvent" access="public" returntype="void" output="false" hint="I set the created date before I am persisted for the first time.">
<cfargument name="event" hint="The event object" type="transfer.com.events.TransferEvent" required="Yes">
<cfset setCreatedDate(now())>
</cffunction>
<cffunction name="actionBeforeUpdateTransferEvent" access="public" returntype="void" output="false" hint="I set the created date before I am persisted for the first time.">
<cfargument name="event" hint="The event object" type="transfer.com.events.TransferEvent" required="Yes">
<cfset setModifiedDate(now())>
</cffunction>
Assuming that we have two properties on our Transfer object for CreatedDate and ModifiedDate, setting those values is now nicely de-coupled from a service or controller layers. Which is one of the reasons I really like using transfer decorators.
Additionally, if you are in the habit of creating these properties on all your business objects, you could place these methods in a base decorator and call super.configure() within the configure() method of your transfer decorator.
Use Ant to Maintain Custom Framework Builds
Posted by Paul Marcotte | Tags: Ant , Coldbox , ColdSpring , Mach-II , Model Glue , Transfer
I'm pretty new to Ant, so I'm thankful that a lot of other developers have examples and sample build files that I can use as a guide to learning Ant. After writing a few small build files, I wanted to tackle something a little more ambitious. I like to keep all the frameworks that I use up to date from their respective repositories, and, when deploying a new site or project, I will typically include the framework dependencies as a minimal include at the project root. This requires a bit of work, exporting and stripping out documentation, examples and tests from my local checkout of the framework files. As a learning objective, I decided to write an ant build file to maintain my own "nightly build" of each framework customized to carry only the core files.cf.Objective() 2008 Reflections
Posted by Paul Marcotte | Tags: cf.Objective() , ColdFusion , Community
I really picked a winner for my first Coldfusion conference. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend every session that I wanted, so I guess I'll have to come back next year! It's really hard to pick a favorite, but the Agile, Coldspring and Coldbox workshops all stand out. Over and above the excellent content and presenters, I got to meet and hang out with some really great folks. I'd start name dropping y'all, but you know who you are... The evening meals had a lot of variety. First there was the fabulous Brazilian churrascaria steakhouse Fogo de Chao, then two classics White Castle and Mickey's Diner, and finally the wonderful Sakura topping it off. Big thanks to Jared, Steven and the entire steering committee for putting on a great conference!