QuackFuzed.com is the personal ColdFusion coding blog of Matt Quackenbush. It exists primarily as a place for the author to learn, and hopefully to assist others in learning and/or avoiding some of the same pitfalls and mistakes. (Quack certainly makes enough mistakes daily to make up for the entire ColdFusion community.)
The purpose of this post is primarily to assist me in remembering this little tidbit, but hopefully it will be of use to someone else as well.
To date (like the pun?) I have not had to use NULL dates with Transfer, so I had never encountered this issue. However, today I needed to handle them, and so I wrote a couple of lines in my decorator thinking that would properly take care of everything.
Over the years it seems that threads on two topics appear over and over again on various mailing lists and forums: code generation and object validation. Paul Marcotte recently released his Metro project which provides an answer to both of these topics. Metro takes advantage of features in Transfer and ColdSpring that are leveraged to help the developer get an application up and running in short order.
In this post, I want to focus on the second topic I mentioned earlier, that being object validation, so let's get to it.
This post is actually a response to a post by Ray Camden. I planned to add a comment to Ray's blog, but I felt it was too long to be considered merely a comment. Here's a snippet from Ray's post that I am specifically responding to:
Code reuse is something that I am very passionate about, and I go out of my way to think through the various intricacies of my applications looking for ways to make my code more reusable. Some might even say that I'm a bit obsessive-compulsive about it. :D
Today I want to brag on Transfer, and show a couple of awesome features that Mark Mandel has built into Transfer that allow OC guys like me to have our cake and eat it too.
Transfer allows you the option of having the database handle your IDs for new records (e.g. 'identity' in MSSQL or 'auto_increment' in MySQL), which is the default behavior for Transfer, or you can have Transfer generate your new IDs for you by utilizing the 'generate' attribute on your ID tag in your transfer.xml config file, and setting it to 'true'. I personally prefer having the database handle my IDs for me, so I never really paid much attention to this particular feature of Transfer until recently.
When using Transfer in your application, you'll often have a One-to-Many (o2m) or a Many-to-Many (m2m) relationship in your Transfer config file. If you review the generated methods docs, you will see that you can grab an iterator with which to loop over the object collection. When you do, don't be a dweeb like me and create a never-ending loop.
Wow! I cannot believe it has been 14 months since I last posted about Transfer. One would think that this was a result of me not using Transfer, which is actually not the case. I've been using it for nearly a year-and-a-half now, but I've been so busy with other things that I just haven't found the time to really dig into it the way that I want (need?) to. Well, diggin' time has arrived.
I've been talking with Mark Mandel for quite some time now, and he is largely responsible for my brain moving from a procedural mindset to an object oriented mindset. God knows that I've asked him a bazillion questions over time, and he's always had the right answer for me (even when that answer has been "RTFM!"). I'll never be able to express my gratitude to him in helping me learn how to become a programmer as opposed to a code writer. (By the way, I am by no means suggesting that I am a programmer - far from it - but I'm moving in that direction.)
When Mark first mentioned Transfer to me, I had no idea what an ORM was. But what he explained to me sounded really cool. It made no sense, but my interest was piqued, because I knew that it was something that would make my life easier and better. Easier? Better? Holy cow! Those two words don't even begin to describe its benefits!
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