Setting up and using Transfer within fusebox via the Transfer lexicons

Setting up Transfer within fusebox via the Transfer lexicons

After my previous post where I cover Setting up Coldspring within fusebox via the CS lexicons I've now just got Transfer working with the Transfer lexicons.

To get Transfer setup you need to initilise the Transfer factory, you do this using the initialize verb. The best place to do this is in the appinit section of fusebox.xml.cfm as this is called when you start your app (it's like the onApplicationStart function in application.cfm). Within this function I call a fuseaction in my model circuit:

So what's heppening here:

<circuit access="public" xmlns:tr="transfer/"> - we're declaring the namespace for the transfer lexicons
tr:init - this calls the initialize verb from the transfer lexicon folder to get Transfer setup.
datasource="/config/datasource.xml.cfm" - this is telling Transfer where to find the datasource config file.
configuration="/config/transfer.xml.cfm" - this is telling Transfer where to find the Transfer config file.
definitions="/model/transferData" - this tells transfer where to put it's generated code

One you run this code Transfer is up and running. Thats it, nothing else left to do. You now have access to all of Transfers features.

Next you'll want to configure Transfer to tell it how all the tables are setup and related (we'll take a simple example here):

So what's the deal here:

<objectDefinitions> - this just declares that you're starting you object definitions
<package name="user"> - this is a neat way to group your objects together (you don't require this)
<object name="user" table="tblUser"> - this setup your object and gives it its name and tells it what table it refers to
<id ...- this is your primary key on the table
<property ... - we use property to list the table columns you want to return. Note you can use any name as long as you tell the property what column to use i.e. <property name="email" type="string" column="emailAddress" />
<onetomany name="address"> - this is telling Transfer that I want to join my user table to my address table, where the I have One user and Many Address
<link column="userID" to="address.address" /> - this is what I join the tables on. I'm telling transfer to look at the address object in the address package and join on userID.

Okay so you now have you Transfer factory created and you have Transfer set up, next you'll want to get data from Transfer. Lets start with looking at what you can do with the fusebox lexicons:

init - we've covered this already above
parameter - this allows you to pass in variables to the read verb
read - this allows you to get a single record
list - this allows you to get a list of records
save - Save records
delete - delete records
populate - Populates a Transfer object with query data

Okay so now we know what lexicons we can use fusebox lets look at a fuseaction (in our model) using the read verb:

Here we have called our checkLogin fuseaction from our model circuit, we then look at the returned bean 'checkLogin'. If it can find a userID then Transfer has found a record. We're happy with this so we setup the session variables and relocate to the user to the account area.
If the userID can't be found then there has been an error with the login so we redirect the user back to the login page.

Wait a second, where did getUserID() come from?
Well as Transfer knows that my table has a userID field, it cleverly goes of and creates getters and setters for that field (as well as any other table field you setup in the config file). We then simple call these getters and setters prefixing the tableField with get or set. How cool is that. Now we've got that clear did you notice we've not written one line of SQL?

I can't recommend downloading and playing with it enough!