Well I’m making pretty good progress with my Model-Glue experient. Thanks to Dave Ross and his “turn the debugging” off double reminder the performance is also pretty darn fast.
Where am I? Well, so far I have the abilitiy to create todo’s that are stored in a single ‘mgTodo’ table in my SQL Server database. I have abstracted that away into a DAO so I could quickly change the backend without a problem and that should work pretty well.
I am using a variant of Jared Rypka-Haur’s facade component (i modified it quite a bit) but it was an excellent basis for my needs to store the current user object in the session scope. That’s right, I have also added some bare bones security to it.
Currently the security is incredibly bare bones using a ConfigBean to identify the only pages in the app that don’t require security and a cached security component to check if the user has access to the requested page. I don’t actually have any kind of real login/authentication setup but it is all stubbed out so I can pretend to login (just nothing gets check in the DB) and my user auto has access to everything once I’m pseudo-logged in.
All of this worked out pretty well with MG and I was able to abstract pretty much everything I needed to. However, I did run into a small problem when I introduced multiple controllers. Basically, all of my controllers need access to my factory object. However, I don’t want to create the factory in each controller and basically have redundant code in each. So, basically, I’m not sure where that should happen.
My solution, was to create a “controller” object that is pretty generic for my needs that extends “ModelGlue.Core.Controller” then each of my controllers extends this generic controller (I know, i’m starting to get a inheiritance tree so I’m not thrilled, but we will see how this works out).
What I was Doing
In my basic Controller’s init method I had it create an instance of the factory object and store it in it’s local variables.instance structure as variables.instance.factory. The main problem I see with this solution is that I get one factory per Controller created still (but the controller is cached by MG in the application scope so at least it isn’t recreated all the time).
As my app grows and I think of other objects that need to be in the singleton (or as my factory creates objects which I typically just store in it’s private scope) I will have repetitive “singletons” which pretty much destroys the whole idea of a singleton. What’s a guy to do?
My Solution
Well I think “What a guy should do” is use the built in Model-Glue “cache” methods, ExistsInCache, AddToCache, and GetFromCache (plus RemoveFromCache). I’m still going to keep my base “controller” object so I know my various controllers have access to my factory and session, but since the main controller checks against the existance of either singleton in cache ahead of time I should maintain the singularity of each.
One Problem
There is still one problem though - the function ModelGlue.Core.Controller.RemoveFromCache says it returns a boolean value. It inturn calls ModelGlue.Util.TimeCache.RemoveValue which doesn’t remove anything (void). This contradiction raises an error saying that the first method (RemoveFromCache) isn’t returning a boolean. So, I updated my copy to return void and changed the line (56) cfreturn variables.ModelGlue.ModelGlueCache.removeValue(arguments.name) to cfset variables.ModelGlue.ModelGlueCache.removeValue(arguments.name)
Comments
Jamie Jackson
Doesn’t appear a bug report was filed for this until today. This is fixed in the bleeding edge version.
http://trac.model-glue.com/model-glue/ticket/307
Bill
You may want to ask Joe Reinhart about how to change the behavior of MG. You can find him at http://www.model-glue.com or sign up for the model-glue mailing list and ask your question there because, frankly, I don’t know the answer to your question.
Anonymous
Hi
In modelglue 1 if we call a function in controller which actually doesnt exist
from the ModelGlue.xml message listener part
it will cause an error.
But in modelglue 2 this doenst seem to happen. Is there any way
to get it back like it was in modelglue 1