Adding Our Update Process using Quick and Mementifier

Background

The update process is more complicated for any number of reasons

• We want to avoid duplication

• Data from the UI is not always complete and fields needs to calculated

• There might be business logic which needs to be done elsewhere on a save

There are many ways to solve these problems including DYI, triggers in the database itself. Another is with something called ORM. ORM is not for every situation and CF has a built in one called Hibernate which will elicit everything cheers, boos and "meh" depending on to whom you're speaking.

The whole point of an ORM system is to hide away a great deal of the boilerplate code and to encapsulate other logic which might need to exist so your devs don't forget about it when they are creating new functionality

Quick is a very lightweight ORM system which is built on QB. A Quick entity is a cfc which typically has a property for each field in the database. It also has ways of keeping track of primary keys, tasks to do on an insert, an update and so on. It can be as simple or complex as you choose.

Creating an Entity

1. In CommandBox from the root of the website type install quick - This the ORM engine itself

2. In CommandBox from the root of the website type install mementifier - This is a module which makes it easier to render CF components into customizable structs

3. In CommandBox type install commandbox-quickgen - This is a tool that can generate quick entities from existing database tables.

4. First we need to give CommandBox a datasource: type quickgen configure a. type 'y' to start the wizard b. Datasource Name : justEnough c. Use the arrow keys and space bar to choose MySQL d. Database Name?: DBNAME e. Username: USERNAME f. Password: PASSWORD g. Host: justenough.cyqisqc1fx3i.us-west-2.rds.amazonaws.com h. Port: 3306 i. Do you want to make MYSQL the default grammar for QB?: n j. Do you want to write this datasource to the .env file to use with cfmigrations?: n\

5. Then we need to generate the entity: quickgen generate datasource=justEnough dbname=DBNAME tableName=users

6. To format it type cfformat run models/entities/users.cfc --overwrite

This will create the users entity in /models/entities.

Creating The Update Handler

function update( event, rc, prc ){
	var valid = validateOrFail(
		target      = rc,
		constraints = {
			"userId"   : { "required" : true, "type" : "numeric", "min" : 1 },
			"email"    : { "required" : true, "type" : "email", "size" : "1..256" },
			"password" : { "required" : true, "type" : "string", "size" : "1..256" }
		}
	);

	var updated = userService.updateUser( valid.userId, valid.email, valid.password );

	prc.response.setData( updated ).addMessage( "user updated" );
}

Creating the updateUser() Method

function updateUser( required numeric userId, required string email, required string password){
	return userEntity
		.find(userId)
		.populate({
			email:arguments.email,
			password:arguments.password
		})
		.save()
		.getMemento();
}