I thought I would take a moment and explain some of the different ways you can use the BaseORMService and VirtualEntityService extras that are included in Coldbox 3.0 M5 and above.

Before I get into the different uses for each, lets define them both and hopefully that will help clarify the differences

Base ORM Service:

The BaseORMService is an amazing service layer tool that can be used in any project. The idea behind this support class is to provide a very good base service layer that can interact with hibernate and entities inspired by Spring's Hibernate Template support. It provides tons of methods for query executions, paging, transactions, session metadata, caching and much more. You can either use the class on its own or create more concrete service layers by inheriting from this class. We also have a virtual service layer that can be mapped to specific entities and create entity driven service layers virtually. ColdBox also offers several integrations to this class via plugins and the autowire DSL.

Virtual Entity Service:

The virtual entity service is another support class that can help you create virtual service layers that are bounded to a specific entity for convenience. This class inherits from our Base ORM Service and allows you to do everything the base class provides, except you do not need to specific which entityName you are working with. You can also use this class as a base class and template out its methods to more concrete usages.

BaseORMService/ORMService Plugin

So first, how might you use the Base ORM Service extra

First, you could use it to create a concrete service that has all the BaseORMService methods in it.  For example. UserService.cfc might look like this

Then you can call things like this

function list(event){
    var rc = event.getCollection();
    var UserService = getModel("UserService");

    //get a listing of all users with paging
    rc.users = UserService.list(entityName="User",sortBy="fname",offset=event.getValue("startrow",1),max=20);

    event.setView("user/list");
  }

Or any of the other available methods in the BaseORMSerivce.  Now with our UserService, we are free to add any of our own business logic to that service that is needed, but have a ton of really cool methods already available to us.

Another way to use the BaseORMService, and I think a simpler way if via the ORMService Plugin.  This plugin gives you access to all the methods in the BaseORMService.

Mainly, I don’t directly use the BaseORMService cfc.  I either create services based of the VirtualEntityService, via the AutowireDSL (which I will explain shortly), or use these features via the ORMService Plugin.

To use the ORMService plugin, we can modify our code above slightly and are ready to go.

function list(event){
    var rc = event.getCollection();

    //get a listing of all users with paging
    rc.users = getPlugin("ORMService").list(entityName="User",sortBy="fname",offset=event.getValue("startrow",1),max=20);

    event.setView("user/list");
  }

I find myself using the ORMService Plugin extensively, so I also always autowire it to my handler, making the code above even simpler.

// A handler
component{
  property name="ORMService" inject="coldbox:plugin:ORMService";

  function list(event){
    var rc = event.getCollection();

    //get a listing of all users with paging
    rc.users = ORMService.list(entityName="User",sortBy="fname",offset=event.getValue("startrow",1),max=20);

    event.setView("user/list");
  }
}

How easy is that.   Tons of functionality right at your fingertips.

VirtualEntityService /Autowire Entity DSL

Generally when creating a concrete service I want to base off of the BaseORMService, I extend the VirtualEntityService and initialize it using the name of the entity that the service concerns. 

Basically, the VirtualEntityService inherits from the BaseORMService and allows you to template out its methods to a specific entity for more concrete uses.  This eliminates the need to type entityName=”someEntity” in your calls, and anything that saves me typing, saves me time and is a GOOD thing.

So, if I was creating that same UserService from above using the VirtualEntityService, it would look like this.

import coldbox.system.orm.hibernate.*;
component extends="VirtualEntityService"{

  public any function init(){
      super.init( "User", true, "user.query.cache" );
      return this;
  }

  // Override or add methods as you see fit now.
}

Pretty cool huh?  Now my list function looks like this

function list(event){
    var rc = event.getCollection();
    var UserService = getModel("UserService");

    //get a listing of all users with paging
    rc.users = UserService .list(sortBy="fname",offset=event.getValue("startrow",1),max=20);

    event.setView("user/list");
  }

So, removing the entityName=”User” from the call, but if you had to call the service even 10 times, that’s a lot of typing saved.

Autowiring

There is also an autowiring DSL to quickly create services based on a specific entity that you can use if don’t need any additional methods or need to override any methods in your service layer.

Per the documentation

// Generic ORM service layer
property name="genericService" inject="entityService";
// Virtual service layer based on the User entity
property name="userService" inject="entityService:User";

So, to implement our UserService and list function we have had in our examples we could have a handler like this

// A handler
component{
  property name="UserService" inject="entityService:User";

  function list(event){
    var rc = event.getCollection();

    //get a listing of all users with paging
    rc.users = UserService.list(sortBy="fname",offset=event.getValue("startrow",1),max=20);

    event.setView("user/list");
  }
}

For more information on the BaseORMService and VirtualEntityService, here are some links to the complete documentation.

http://wiki.coldbox.org/wiki/Extras:BaseORMService.cfm

http://wiki.coldbox.org/wiki/Extras:VirtualEntityService.cfm

Hopefully this post helps you understand how you can use these AWESOME extras in your environment.

Read more...

There have been several changes from the ORM support classes from M5 to M6 that I will recap here thanks to muji in our google group and also to help out in the transition.  Our ORM support services are maturing every day and moving to a great solid release for 3.0.0 Final.  So let’s recap some of the changes:

• Entity dependency injection are now controller and configured via the Autowire interceptor and not the ORM event handler anymore.  However, the ORM event handler MUST be enabled first.
• findWhere() and findAllWhere() method parameters have changed, requiring a tweak in your code to account for the change.  Instead of accepting any add'l arguments besides orm entityName as the criteria, both functions now expect a "criteria" structure.
• new() now takes in a properties argument that will be used to populate the new entity with
• find() is now findIt() to not mess with the CF functions
• get() now returns a new() entity if passed id=0 for convenience
• deleteByID() returns # of rows deleted instead of boolean
• new deleteAll() function
• new validate(entity) function calls underlying Hibernate Validator() (EXPERIMENTAL), we are still evaluating our validation frameworks, but we would like to stay very very close to what Hibernate and JPA already offer. (http://links.mkt3261.com/ctt?kn=1&m=3181979&r=MTM5NTYzMTU5MjMS1&b=0&j=MTg5NjgzNjAyS0&mt=1&rt=0)  All help on this area is welcomed
• new inline populate() functions: populate(), populatFromXML(), populateFromJSON(), populateFromQuery()
• new() creations now announce an ORMPostNew interception if the ORM event handler has been created
• New service property: EventHandling used by the service to announce certain things like ORMPostNew interceptions.

I believe these are the changes, am I missing something, please comment about it?

Once you get an appreciation for the importance of unit testing and integration testing is when we reach a new level in our development careers.  Testing is critical to mission critical applications, and even for our own little projects, where we test that our code should work as expected.  There’s that word again, expected.  Expectations in unit testing is like a nasty hamburger at a soccer match in El Salvador.  They go hand in hand :)

Read more...

Thanks to our 3.0.0 milestones, the SES capabilities have been really fine tuned and added some great concepts in order to enable it for more RESTful applications.  We have added things like:

• -alpha : Alpha only placeholders
• {X} : Digit quantifiers for all placeholders
• constraints : A separate structure where you can give any placeholder your own regular expression
• RESTful actions : A way to split actions according to the incoming HTTP method

The last one is what we will concentrate on.  In true RESTful style URLs, we must concentrate on the concept of resources or endpoints we are trying to describe.  Say: http://www.example.com/users  most likely will represent users, but we could also have: http://www.example.com/users/lmajano which describes a user but with a more detailed part which is lmajano.

Requests and responses are built around the transfer of "representations" of "resources"

"Representational State Transfer is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: a network of web pages (a virtual state-machine), where the user progresses through an application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use."

It is also important to note that REST is a style of URL architecture not a mandate, so it is an open avenue of sorts.  However, you must stay true to its concepts of resources and usage of the HTTP verbs.  Here are a few pointers when using the HTTP verbs:

• POST : Create a resource
• GET : Retrieve a resource(s)
• PUT : Update a resource
• DELETE : delete a resource

So examples for true RESTful URLs:

• GET /users
  return a list of users
• GET /users/lmajano
  return the representation of user lmajano
• POST /users
  create a new user with post data
• PUT /users/lmajano
  Update the lmajano user
• DELETE /users/lmajano
  Delete the lmajano user

So how can we do this in ColdBox? Very easily! The new 3.0.0 SES interceptor allows for a pattern to be bounded to a handler and a structure of actions that match the incoming HTTP verbs:

// User representation

addRoute(pattern="users/:user",    
handler="rest.Users",    
action={    
GET = "show",    
POST = "create",    
DELETE = "remove",    
HEAD = "info"    
});

As you can see, the action argument can be a structure or a JSON structure of mappings between HTTP verbs and the action method you wish to fire whenever the resource is accessed with that method.  So if I go to /users/lmajano with a DELETE, then we will execute: rest.Users.remove().  So the approach of binding HTTP verbs to the correct actions, can give us TRUE RESTful URLs instead of us trying to create tons of URL representations and always using POST and GET. 

In conclusion, ColdBox 3.0.0 adheres to the standard RESTful principles and gives you a way to do HTTP verb to action mappings very easily when creating your resource URLs.  Stay tuned for more information on other useful RESTful features we have on 3.0 like:

• HTTP method security right from within your handlers
• onError() conventions when RESTful handlers throw exceptions
• Request context updates to retrieve headers and content
• Much more

With ColdBox 3.0.0 you can use any kind of regular expression with your SES routes which makes it extremely flexible.  One way to accomplish this is by using the constraints arguments when calling the addRoute() method to add a routing entry. So if I wanted to add a placeholder that matches a regex then I would do this:

As you can see from the code above, the constraints argument is a structure in which the keys match a :placeholder in the pattern string.  Then you start of the values with a parenthesis so the expression can be grouped and match and then I place my regex, which in my case is a simple xml or json value.  However, you can get very funky and use your own regular expressions on ANY placeholder.