Thank you to everyone who came out to my presentation on Searching ORM at cf.Objective().

Here are the slides

Here are the slides and code from my Adobe MAX ColdFusion Unconference talk 5 Ways To Improve Your App with ORM:

And the code which will set up the Derby DSNs and tables needed.

Available as a download and from Github. After installing:

1. Go to setUp.cfm
2. Enter in your cfadmin password and click 'Make Datasources'
3. Go back to setUp.cfm and click on 'Go to App'

All of the mini apps/examples I used in the demo will now work.

By default an ORM relationship is an array. Using a structure (map for non-ColdFusion programmers) is very easy and provides nice options. Lets start with a simple relationship between of users and addresses.

User.cfc

Address.cfc

A single user object with two addresses would look like this:

Now, if we want to find out if the user has a work address we need to loop through getAddress(). Thats ok but by converting the relationship to a struct its possible to then use structure functions. Here is the relationship in User.cfc defined to return a structure:

A dump of the user object now looks like:

Which means we can use code like this, in particular line 3:

For reference here is the Application.cfc to set up Hibernate/ORM:

I've pretty much overlooked the secondary cache for ORM and, having now played with it, I've realized what a big feature and performance enhancer this is.

In short with secondary cache on ColdFusion can get data from ehCache instead of the database. Set up ColdFusion 9.0.1 and you can share entity data across both ColdFusion instances and servers!

Let backtrack and take a look at a basic set up:

To turn on secondary cache set secondaryCacheEnabled to true (the default is false). In this example I have also turned logsql to true*. Now lets look at our persistent cfc:

User.cfc

That really is it. The two cache attributes tell ColdFusion to use secondary cache for this data. From now on a call like:

To help work out what secondary cache is doing I did two things in User.cfc:

1. added a version field which would definitively show when Hibernate had updated the record (another very cool underused feature)
2. added my own getter to verify that secondary cache returns data via the cfc and not just flat

Now there are four types of cacheuse, here are the differences:

• transactional cache is updated on the update statement and the next request of the data will get it straight from cache and not run a select
• nonstrict-read-write Cache is updated on the first select after data is updated or inserted
• read-write I could not get this to work with caching (docs say its the worst performing anyway)
• read-only Only works with data that will not be updated. Produces an error if you attempt to update or insert records. (Marc Esher wrote a long, funny blog entry about using secondary cache to cache for a read-only view)

I'm going to look more into secondary cache and hopefully come up with real examples but for now I know two things: 1) its very powerful, 2) its very easy to use.

* If ColdFusion is started from the Builder server panel the console tab will display all the SQL Hibernate produces. I used it to see when Hibernate went to cache and when the database.

At 16applications I use ORM extensively. Recently I wanted to track when users sessions timed out which the onSessionEnd function in Application.cfc is perfect for.

onSessionEnd is interesting in that its not part of a standard ColdFusion request process which ORM is somewhat dependent on. In order to use ORM inside it I had to use ormFlush() to get changes to flush to the database.

Data types for dates and times are slightly different across databases which often makes life difficult for us developers. ColdFusion ORM makes this pretty simple:

• For a date with time use ormtype="timestamp"
• Just a date use ormtype="date"

There are no other options!

Full example with the property tag:

I really enjoyed giving my 15 things you should know about ORM presentation at CFUnited. Here are the slides:

Bob Silverburg came to me afterwards and corrected some of the information I had presented about the inverse property settings for relationships. Here is my latest attempt at explaining inverse:

• it only impacts bi-directional relationships
• both sides of the realtionship get add, has, remove functions
• both sides of the relationship should be maintained with the above functions
• Hibernate, though, will run two update statements. This is the need for setting inverse=true on the 'one-to-many' side. This will will tell Hibernate to only run one update statement.

ColdFusion 9.0.1 brings multiple datasources support for ORM. Here is how to set it up.

In this example, we are going to use both the cfartgallery and cfbookclub datasources.  In the Application.cfc we will make the cfartgallery the default datasource.  Optionally we are going to set the dbcreate rules differently for the two datasources.  (We could also do this for the schema, catalog, dialect and sqlscript settings.)

From cfartgallery we will use the Art table as an object.  As cfartgallery is the default datasource, this is set up as usual:

For any tables from the cfbookclub datasource there is an additional attribute "datasource" for the component:

We can then get the data and dump it like so:

 Pretty straighforward and pretty cool stuff.

While writing SpreadEdit I wanted every entity to be editable via cfgrid.  In particular I thought it would be cool to have one cfc on the back end to process the data from cfgrid no matter what entity it was working with.  With ColdFusion 9 and ORM this proved possible and is pretty cool, check out the screencast.  Code the other side of the embed.

Here is the code for genericGrid.cfc: