Sam Farmer

10 Little Ones: What are Implicit Accessors?

ColdFusion 10 added implicit accessors and in this post I'll cover how to turn them on and use them.

Turning on implicit accessors is achieved via a straightforward setting in application.cfc:
component { this.name = "implicitFun"; this.invokeImplicitAccessor = true; }

Once on this means we can now access a getter and setter function of an object/cfc using the same syntax as if it where a struct. Let's look at a simple component called user.cfc:
component accessors="true" { property firstname; property lastname; function getFirstname() { return UCase( variables.firstname ); } function getName() { return variables.firstname & " " & variables.lastname; } }

Now let's see what happens when we make an object and start interacting with it:
//using the automatic constructor -- there is no init //function in user user = new user( firstname="Homer", lastname="Simpson" ); //calling firstname will run getter function //in CF9 this was user.getFirstname() writeOutput( user.firstname ); /*DISPLAYS: HOMER */ //calling name which directly references variables scope does //not call getter function writeOutput( user.name ); /*DISPLAYS: Homer Simpson */ //now lets change the name and call it again: user.firstname = "Lisa"; writeOutput( user.firstname ); /*DISPLAYS: LISA */

As you can see from the code above when you call the implicit accessor on an object it calls the getter or setter function but within a cfc calling the variables scope directly calls the variable and not the getter or setter function.

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