Article by Alwyn.
Published: January 15, 2010 at 14:25
Category: ColdFusion

ColdFusion 9 and ORM: Write all, read some

Just a little thing I found out today using Coldfusion 9 new ORM feature. Say you have a login system based on a user table, this can easily be done with orm. You just create a cfc where you define your database fileds as parameters and call the necessary orm function.
Out of the box this works great, you can fetch, insert, update and remove with ease.
The only drawback here is that even when requesting for instance all users from the database, the login information is also retrieved and placed in the result object. Those values are not really necessary when you just want to show an overview of all you users. So let’s take a look at how you can modify your cfc’s prevent this from happening.

Let’s first take a look at the user.cfc object that is used for database mapping:

<cfcomponent persistent="true" output="false" accessors="true">
    <cfproperty name="user_id" ormtype="integer" fieldtype="id"  generator="native"/>
    <cfproperty name="firstname" ormtype="string"/>
    <cfproperty name="lastname" ormtype="string"/>
    <cfproperty name="email" ormtype="string"/>
    <cfproperty name="login" type="string" />
    <cfproperty name="password" type="string"/>
</cfcomponent>

With this class, loging a user into the system is really easy, I just use

EntityLoad("User", {login="#FORM.username#", password="#FORM.password#"});

And as a result I get the user object on which I can do further testing.

Now let’s take a look at the dump of this object:

As you can see, also the login and pass are returned, the same problem occurs when I use the following code to load and display all the users.

   <!--- list user --->
   EntityLoad("User");

These (login, pass) are values I don’t need so let’s tell CF to only load the values I really need when fetching rows. The solution is actually really easy, the only thing you have to do is set the getter property of the cfproperty to false. The update user.cfc will look like this

<cfcomponent persistent="true" output="false" accessors="true">
    <cfproperty name="user_id" ormtype="integer" fieldtype="id"  generator="native"/>
    <cfproperty name="firstname" ormtype="string"/>
    <cfproperty name="lastname" ormtype="string"/>
    <cfproperty name="email" ormtype="string"/>
    <cfproperty name="login" type="string" getter="false" />
    <cfproperty name="password" getter="false" type="string"/>
</cfcomponent>

And if you take a look at the dump, you will see that the login and pass fields are now no longer filled when doing a fetch! And the login system will still work because the setter property is still set to true!