If you use Transfer ORM you may have seen Mark Mandel's Advanced Transfer ORM Techniques presentation. One of the most interesting portions of this presentation (for me) was his coverage of the Transfer Event Model. Mark demonstrates how to setup a service (in this case a CryptService) as a Transfer Event listener. There are several events that objects can register to as listeners. One event type is "AfterNew", which is fired when a new transfer object is created. In the presentation Mark demonstrates how to leverage the Event Model with an AfterNew event and a decorated transfer object to encrypt/decrypt a user password. I wanted to use this concept for a new project, but rather than copying code verbatim from the presentation, I decided to try something a little different.

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In this post I'll provide a deeper insight into how Dispatcher works and introduce the three generic views that make up the "generic admin". After generating some code with Illudium, we'll have all the pieces to perform CRUD operations...

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I introduced a lot of pieces to the puzzle during parts 1 through 4 of this series and with this post, I hope to put them together. We'll look at a file and folder setup, ColdSpring and Transfer XML configuration files and the other files that form application for the generic admin...

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If you are not using Illudium to generate your application classes, I encourage you to check it out. Out of the box, the code generator comes with several templates for generating CFCs, Transfer and ColdSpring XML, Actionscript VOs (value objects) and TOs (simple transfer objects designed for Flex development). Modifying, or creating your own templates is encouraged and easy. The template I developed for this series uses ColdFusion templating, but you can also use XSLT or a combination of both...

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Generating scaffolds for list, edit and view pages for business objects is an essential part of a many frameworks (in many languages) available to developers. I've done a little window shopping with RoR, Symfony, and MG:U, but have never committed the time to make a go of any one framework. When recently faced with a "quick and dirty" build for trivia game for a friend, I felt that familiar dread of building a "back-end" administration system. Fortunately, I had spent enough time working with ColdSpring, Illudium, Transfer and my own Event Delegation based front controller (which I call Dispatcher), that I was willing to give building my own scaffold based generic admin a go...

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Over the past month, I've worked on some projects that required special data handling and calculated values. I considered using Peter Bell's Iterating Business Object, but instead decided to build an Iterator that can be composed into my domain objects. I'm a big fan of using "composition over inheritance", so I saw this as a prefect opportunity to add iteration to my domain objects with a minimum impact.

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