Passing null/empty values from a actionscript VO to a Coldfusion ORM object

Question

This is the situation.
If you have an actionscript VO that binds to a Coldfusion ORM object via the RemoteClass metadata and some of the values are not set, null, or empty strings and you pass it from Flex to Coldfusion then the Coldfusion deserialization barfs saying the values are not acceptable date values (for type="date") or valid emails (for validation="email") or other such validations, even if required="false" on the property.
For instance, if you have the following actionscript VO:
package vo
    [RemoteClass(alias="com.companyname.Person")]
    [Bindable]
    public class Person
        public var person_id:Number;
        public var last_name:String;
        public var first_name:String;
        public var email:String;
        public var created_date:date;
     public function Person() {}
And you have the corresponding Coldfusion component:
<cfcomponent displayname="person" output="false"
    alias="com.companyname.Person"
    schema="dbo" persistent="true"
    table="PERSON">
    <cfproperty name="person_id" type="numeric" fieldtype="id" validate="integer" required="true" column="PERSON_ID"/>
    <cfproperty name="last_name" type="string" column="LAST_NAME" required="true"/>
    <cfproperty name="first_name" type="string" required="true" column="FIRST_NAME"/>
    <cfproperty name="email" type="string" validate="email" required="false" column="EMAIL"/>
    <cfproperty name="date_created" type="date" required="false" column="DATE_CREATED"/>
</cfcomponent>
Then if you pass the actionscript VO as is to Coldfusion, the deserialization complains that you do not have a valid email or a valid date for date_created.  This is bad, bad, bad.  Essentially if you have a validation of certain types (email being one) or a date property, or probably some other cases, then you essentially can not make it not required, it automatically makes it required because the Coldfusion serializer considers null/empty values as invalid dates or emails.  But the serializer should not care for values that are not required, there has to be a way to pass null/empty values to these data types, but apparently there's not.  If you pass an empty string ("") you still have the same problem.  I know Coldfusion does not have null values, but there has to be a way to do this, otherwise it defeats the purpose of having required="false" and some kind of validation on the property.
There seems to be two ways around it.  One is to override the implicit setters for the properties on the Coldfusion side and check for 0 length values yourself, then set the property if it is not, or create your own validation routine.  I ended up creating my own validation function since I didn't want to have to write a setter function for everyone of these cases and I can pass back user friendly validation messages.
Have other people encountered this problem?  How have you gotten around it?  Thanks.

Answer 1

I realize that I didn't clarify that I am using ColdFusion
for getting the data. This class was generated by the Create CFC
wizard in Flex Builder.
package com.generated
[Managed]
[RemoteClass(alias="components.generated.clients.Clients")]
public class Clients
public var clientid:Number = 0;
public var clientfirstname:String = "";
public var clientlastname:String = "";
public var clientaddress1:String = "";
public var clientaddress2:String = "";
public var clientcity:String = "";
public var clientstate:String = "";
public var clientzip:String = "";
public var clientphone:String = "";
public var clientemail:String = "";
public function Clients()
}