How to use Flex Builders Auto Generated CFCs

Question

OK. Not only have I already gone to a 4 day flex training,
have an advanced coldfusion certification and work with 3 coworkers
who have done the same...none of us can figure out how in the heck
the flex builder's autogenerated cfc's are to be used. No big deal
on the fact that this might be something we simply are encountering
for the first time, but the complete and utter absence of a single
piece of example code or documentation stating how to use this code
correctly is very very very very irritating.
Can anybody, share with me anything about how these CFCs are
to be used correctly. For example. We are using the wizard to
generate an "Active Record CFC" set of cfc's for an example table
contain four fields. We have a data grid that is now populated by
the "getAllAsQuery" function....we would like to implement the
feature of making this dataGrid updateable. We know how to pass
data back and forth and yes we could write our own CFC to do
this...but having it autogenerated is a really neat option...but
the question remains....how does one use them!!!
Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Hi there, what's your name by the way?
What is a VO or DTO, and why would you use it?
This was copy from the Java world, so it's a very OOP principle, basically in the OOP world everything is a class that has methods and properties, and you represent everything with classes, a VO is just that a class that represents an entity in your app. You use it for a few reasons in my opinion:
It allows you to pass strongly typed data between different layers in your app.
It's more verbose, it's a good OOP practice, and also makes debugging and reading you code easier.
It allows easy data type conversion between CF and Flex.
You obviously know how to use the wizards, after you select your table and open the wizard you'll see three different CFC types, if you're using LCDS then select that type if you don't I'll recommend you to go with BEAN/DAO. In Flex Builder you can create a folder link to a system folder, so if you create a folder named MyCFCs and you set this virtual folder to be hold inside c:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot every file that you put in this folder will be place in c:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot so you don't have to manually copy those files.
In this wizard you'll see CFC folder in there you can select your virtual folder, you'll see below the CFC package name this is extremely important to be set right, what is the CFC package name? Basically it's the same folder structure where your CFCs will be located for instance let's say you're gonna place the files in this folder structure c:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\com\myPersonalDomain\ so your CFC package name will be com.myPersonalDomain.
You'll probably also would like to enable the option: Create an ActionScript value object in addition to CFCs, the folder where you place this file have to mimic the CFCs folder structure so for an instance you'll have to save inside your src folder, inside a folder com, an finally inside a folder myPersonalDomain . src/com/myPersonalDomain, and the AS Package name should be the same as the CFC.
Once you're done and click finish, you'll see for files created, one of the the AS VO , and three CFCs.
yourDataTable.CFC
This is a CFC that creates the VO or DTO in CFC, it has the same properties definition that the AS version has, also the setters and getter for every property.
yourDataTableDAO.CFC
This CFC contains all the code that handles the database access it a could be an insert, update delete or just a read query.
yourDataTableGateway.CFC
This is a bridge between your Flex app and your CFCs, it contains a set of methods commonly use when you access a DB, this CFC invocates the methods in the yourDataTableDAO.cfc and returns an object or an array of objects of yourDataTable.CFC type to Flex.
In Flex what do you have to do in order to use VOs?
Add a reference to yourDataTable.as class
Create a remote object.
Create the event handler(s)
Make a call to the remote object.
<mx:Script>
     <![CDATA[
               import com.myPersonalDomain;
               import mx.controls.Alert;
             import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
              private var myDummyVar:myDataTable;
          private function myEventHandler(e:ResultEvent):void{
               //do Something
               trace(event.result.toString());
     ]]>
</mx:Script>
<mx:RemoteObject id="myRO" destination="ColdFusion"
source="com.myPersonalDomain.myDataTableGateway">
     <mx:method name="getAll" result="myResultHandler(event)"
fault="Alert.show(event.fault.toString())" >
</mx:RemoteObject>
<mx:Button label="Call CF" click="myRO.getAll()" />
Well I hope this would help you, I'm kinda tired this has been by far the largest post I've written.