Brian Hoke Presents at ColdFusion User's Group of Central New York: Object-Relational Mapping in ColdFusion

Brian Hoke's talk at today's CFUGCNY meeting explained object-relational mapping, presented some code examples, and listed some tools for code generation. An overview of the discussion, along with links to source code, is below.

What is ORM?

  • Code development strategy using OOP classes to "wrap" SQL tables
  • Every DB table has a corresponding CFC
  • Client code uses CFC ("person.getFname()") instead of CFQUERY
  • Best of both worlds: maintainable, team-able code through OOP; storage of data in (familiar) SQL DB
  • Ruby on Rails, symfony
  • automating the process - tools to create classes from DBs

(Examples below assume a ColdFusion DSN named "CFUGCNY_ORM" points to a database with a table People)

Traditional Development

Data resides in SQL tables, logic resides in CF templates - things and operations on those things are not tied together; making changes (new DB schema, different SQL vendor, new operations on data, etc.) requires digging into each CF template

Code Example: people-sql.cfm.txt

ORM Development

Data resides in SQL tables but abstracted in layer of OOP classes (CFCs) - things and operations on those things are tied together; making changes easier, since "person" code (data storage, operations on those data) is collected in one spot and abstraction layer makes swapping SQL flavor/vendor/schema much easier

Code Example: people-orm.cfm.txt | person.cfc

Reactor

Reactor is an ORM tool that generates on-the-fly CFCs from existing DB tables

Code Example: people-reactor.cfm.txt

More Info

This item was published on 06/12/2007

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