CFC Vs. Structure of functions.

Question

Hi,
I've written a small framework for Coldfusion that has
similar functionality to that of CakePHP, but ran into a strange
performance issue. Here's the basic operation of the framework as
far as the problem is concerned...
URL's rewritten and handled by
"router.cfc" that processes the URL.
Router then calls the related
controller/action.
A View.cfc is instantiated and used
to call "helpers" (CFC containing functions for form validation or
other tasks).
The View.cfc then cleans the
variables scope and passes any variables set by the
controller/action, to the requested view (cfm).
View.cfc captures the view output and
then uses this in the relevant layout.
Now here's the problem, everything works well up until the
view itself (the [action].cfm template
included by the view.cfc with a clean variables scope)
starts using a helper cfc. The helper CFC is loaded into this.html
(for example) and is used like this.html.error('fieldname') to
return a message or variable. Creation of the CFC is fine but
multiple calls to it's functions is slow.
I compared this against calling the same functions but held
in a structure in the views variables scope and the performance was
perfect.
Does anyone know of performance pitfalls with CFC's that
might be causing this, or ways around it. I'd be happy enough to
use normal functions if I could keep the variables scope clean by
storing them in a structure, but Coldfusion doesn't seem happy
about '<cffunction name="help.html.error">'.
Any ideas?
Thanks

Answer 1

ddks2 wrote:
> Thanks for the reply.
>
> Regarding the CFReports vs. Flashpaper. Still some
confusing here on my side.
> From my understanding I could use CFReport to create a
report and then output
> this as a FlashPaper (or PDF). I thought one could also
use CFQuery to create
> a report (more or less manually in HTML) and import this
into FlashPaper?! Is
> this not possible? I tried looking at the Flashpaper
documentation but couldn't
> find this specifically but again assume CF8 has the
Flash integration to make
> this possible?!
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel
>
Well the you could use the <cfquery...> tag to get data
from a database
and then use several tags such as <cfoutput
query="recordset"> to output
the file as HTML or other text formats.
What you maybe thinking of is the <cfdocument...> tag
which can be
wrapped around basic HTML or other text. This content would
then be
delivered to the client as PDF or FlashPaper. This can be a
nice way to
make 'printer' friendly versions of a web page, but is by no
means
limited to just that purpose.
The difference between <cfdocument...> and
<cfreport...> is that report
supports pagination features then document. The ability to
have report,
section and page headers and footers, sub-reports, and other
nice to
have report formating functionality. But it requires an
seperate tool
to build the report templates over the simple text editor
required for a
HTML document converted with the <cfdocument...> tag.
Then, of course, there are the stand alone Flashpaper tools
available to
people who just want to create Flashpaper documents on their
desktops
and deliver these over the internet. The same as PDF people
who use
Adobe Acrobat to create PDF documents on their desktop that
can be
delivered over the internet if desired. But neither of these
are
particularly ColdFusion concepts.