CFProperty Inspector on RiaForge

I've released the CFPROPERTY Inspector on riaforge and google code for those interested in it.

This Utility is designed to introspect components and auto-create CFPROPERTY tags based on the function meta data.
Specify the mapping to your components, and choose which cfc's you want to have CFPROPERTY Tags defined on them as well as what properties of your components that you wish to have CFPROPERTY tags defined for. (for assisting in getting your components well defined for Flex integration etc.)

For Screen Shots and more checkout cfproperty.riaforge.org and to download the code visit Google Code here.









Let me know what you think.

Manipulating CFC Properties through getMetaData

I started toying with the idea of creating a generic utility that would populate a cfc with ‘property’ as in cfproperty data and I have something work now – (this would make the compatibility between flex and the model that much better and more ‘well defined’)

Would this be of benefit to us – i.e. running our model through it which would then create all cfproperty tags for a given object based on the getter methods w/in the object – and determine datatype of string, numeric etc – based on the getter methods data etc –

What sort of things do I have to be careful of ??

Order of the cfproperty tags counts right – and Case sensitivity of the names obviously ??

So the process would either do it alpha – or by order that was returned by getMetaData on the object –

An interesting thing happens however when I’m doing this – I could actually build this into coldspring likely where these properties are autogenerated on the fly and never actually have to exist w/in the cfc (written back to the cfc)

The strange thing happened was this:

Once I do a create object on a cfc – I can dump it and it shows that there are NO properties defined in the meta data – which is good

So I run it through my process where I’m introspecting the cfc and create this ‘properties’ key and append the array to this key.

This works well and now a side by side before and after shows the left object with NO properties and the right with Properties – great.

However the next time I run it – the left side also shows that the object now HAS properties –

This is strange – b/c cfproperty tags don’t actually exist in the cfc – but yet I’m able to fake cf (caching likely) into thinking / assigning these properties to the object.

For Example:

Here my Job Object has NO cfproperty tags:

I’m going to make ColdFusion ‘think’ it has these properties defined on it by manipulating the metadata about the object.

Simple App/UI

There are No properties on the left – On the right below, shows the ‘manipulated’ meta data based on the getter methods in the object.

Now after I run this again – you see both left and right are identical (cached metadata about the object)

The left side ‘thinks’ that the object now has these properties available to it- which if called or introspected by Flex, they should be available.

This feels a bit like cheating, but if it doesn’t work – we can always complete this thought by having the process ‘write’ the cfproperty tags back to the object.

Interesting huh?