ColdFusion 9 Oddities

I ran into a couple interesting things when playing around with ColdFusion 9 today.

Oddity #1:
I was trying to create a really simple User entity using ORM.

User.cfc

<cfcomponent persistent="true">

 <cfproperty name="id" fieldtype="id" generator="native" />
 <cfproperty name="firstName" />
 <cfproperty name="lastName" />
 <cfproperty name="isDeleted" type="boolean" />
 <cfproperty name="createdOn" type="date" />

</cfcomponent>

Here's what a dump of the User looks like:



I realized that I typically put isDeleted and createdOn on all of my entities, so I decided I would put them on a base class, Entity.cfc, that my User entity could extend. Here's the updated components:

User.cfc

<cfcomponent persistent="true" extends="Entity">

 <cfproperty name="id" fieldtype="id" generator="native" />
 <cfproperty name="firstName" />
 <cfproperty name="lastName" />

</cfcomponent>

Entity.cfc

<cfcomponent>

 <cfproperty name="isDeleted" type="boolean" />
 <cfproperty name="createdOn" type="date" />

</cfcomponent>

However, when I went to look at my User, I noticed the extended properties were missing.



After a little while, I tried adding accessors="true" to my Entity base class. It seems slightly odd to need to add that since the parent object is persistent, but it gave me my getters and setters back.

Entity.cfc

<cfcomponent accessors="true">

 <cfproperty name="isDeleted" type="boolean" />
 <cfproperty name="createdOn" type="date" />

</cfcomponent>

And here's the result:



All good, right? Unfortunately not. I tried executing the following code:

index.cfm

<cfset user = EntityNew("User") />

<cfset user.setFirstName("Tony") />
<cfset user.setLastName("Nelson") />
<cfset user.setIsDeleted(0) />
<cfset user.setCreatedOn(now()) />

<cfset EntitySave(user) />

While this appeared to work in the interface. when I took a peak at the database, it didn't save my isDeleted or createdOn values. In fact, it didn't even create the columns in the database.

I decided to check out what Hibernate was doing by setting this.ormSettings.saveMapping = true in my Application.cfc. Here's the auto-generated User.hbmxml:

User.hbmxml

<!DOCTYPE hibernate-mapping PUBLIC "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Mapping DTD 3.0//EN"
                                   "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-mapping-3.0.dtd">
<hibernate-mapping>
    <class entity-name="User" lazy="true" name="cfc:cat.User" table="`User`">
        <id name="id" type="int">
            <column name="id"/>
            <generator class="native"/>
        </id>
        <property name="firstName" type="string">
            <column name="firstName"/>
        </property>
        <property name="lastName" type="string">
            <column name="lastName"/>
        </property>
    </class>
</hibernate-mapping>

Apparently Hibernate wasn't able to pick up any properties defined in my base Entity.cfc. To solve this, I simply manually added the properties to the hibernate mapping file like such:

User.hbmxml

<!DOCTYPE hibernate-mapping PUBLIC "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Mapping DTD 3.0//EN"
                                   "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-mapping-3.0.dtd">
<hibernate-mapping>
    <class entity-name="User" lazy="true" name="cfc:cat.User" table="`User`">
        <id name="id" type="int">
            <column length="10" name="id"/>
            <generator class="native"/>
        </id>
        <property name="firstName" type="string">
            <column length="255" name="firstName"/>
        </property>
        <property name="lastName" type="string">
            <column length="255" name="lastName"/>
        </property>
        <property name="isDeleted" type="boolean">
            <column name="isDeleted"/>
        </property>
        <property name="createdOn" type="date">
            <column name="createdOn"/>
        </property>
    </class>
</hibernate-mapping>

This seemed to do the trick and everything was happy once again. I guess I'll be using the mapping files more than I had originally planned.

Oddity #2:
It appears that using ColdFusion mixins inside CFCs no longer works in CF9. Take the following really basic example:

User.cfc

<cfcomponent>

 <cfinclude template="mixin.cfm" />

</cfcomponent>

mixin.cfm

<cffunction name="sayHello">

 <cfreturn "Hello, world" />
 
</cffunction>

I could then create a new User like so:

index.cfm

<cfset user = createObject("component","User") />

<cfdump var="#user#" />

If I were to run this code in CF8, I would get a User that looked like:



However in CF9, I get a completely empty User object:



Odd. Yeah it's not a very common use-case, but it's still something that can come in handy every now and then.

UPDATE: Apparently mixins still work, they just don't appear when you dump the component.