ColdFusion 9 ORM Custom Naming Strategy

I'm pretty particular when it comes to naming conventions. If I'm working with code and objects, I prefer properties to be in written in camel case. However, I like database fields to be written in proper case, with all spaces replaced with underscores. For example, I would have user.id and user.firstName in my code, but User.ID and User.First_Name in my database.

Hibernate is able to automatically generate your database schema for you based on your *.hbmxml files, which can be automatically generated for you by ColdFusion after creating your Entity CFCs. While this can be a really handy feature for development, I was a little annoyed when Hibernate generated all of my columns in camel case to match my properties.

Then I found a really nice post by an Adobe engineer that talked about using a custom naming strategy, which is a component that Hibernate can use to generate your database table and column names.

In your Application.cfc, you can set this.ormSettings.namingStrategy to a CFC that implements the "cfide.orm.INamingStrategy" interface.

cfide.orm.INamingStrategy

component {

 public string function getTableName(string tableName) {
 }

 public string function getColumnName(string columnName) {
 }

}

With that in mind, here's my UncamelizeStrategy.cfc

component implements="cfide.orm.INamingStrategy" {

 public string function getTableName(string tableName) {
  return uncamelize(tableName);
 }

 public string function getColumnName(string columnName) {
  return uncamelize(columnName);
 }

 private string function uncamelize(string name) {

  var array = [];

  for (var i=1;i <= len(name);i++) {
   var char = mid(name,i,1);

   if(i == 1) {
    arrayAppend(array,ucase(char));
   }
   else {
    if(reFind("[A-Z]",char)) {
     arrayAppend(array,"_" & char);
    }
    else {
     arrayAppend(array,lcase(char));
    }
   }
  }

  var newName = arrayToList(array,"");

  if(newName == "Id") {
   newName = "ID";
  }
  else if(right(newName,3) == "_Id") {
   newName = left(newName,len(newName)-3) & "_ID";
  }

  return newName;

 }

}

I'm sure there's probably an easier way to write this, perhaps using a regular expression, but I chose the brute-force approach of looping over each character. Short and simple.