In a recent newsletter from Hal Helms he discussed having a component that all of his other components extend. I have been doing this for a while and I think it is a pretty good idea in general because I almost always want these individual methods in “all” of my CFCs. Granted, there are some that don’t really need the methods but the are pretty generic utility methods and so for now they sit in my basecomponent.cfc
Admittedly some of them are pretty much only pertinent to “bean” type components. That is those components that have a stateful representation of data. I have debated having a baseComponent.cfc and a bean.cfc that extends baseComponent.cfc and then have all my beans extend bean.cfc - but I haven’t been willing to add the intermediary step to my inheiritance chain yet.
Basically the way I do things is any object that doesn’t have a “super” by definition automatically extends my baseComponent.cfc
Here are the methods in my baseComponent:
properties..(not a method)
Pretty simple just creates a struct variables.instance and calls the “setUUID” method
setUUID
stores a readonly UUID for the object. Useful for object comparision
getUUID
fetches the objects UUID
equalTo
Compares the current objects UUID to a passed in objects UUID
getMemento
A fairly robust getMemento method that expands any children objects into their memento forms as well. Uses a private method copyMementoStruct recursively
copy
Makes a full copy of an object including its composite objects. Uses a private method copyProperty recursively
dump
Dumps the objects memento to show the object’s current state and optionally aborts
Obviously the Memento stuff is what I was talking about when I said it doesn’t all fit EVERY object, but I don’t think the overhead of these few methods is that big a deal.
If anyone would like a copy of this CFC just let me know and I’d be happy to share.
Comments
Bill
Puc, If you want to give me an email address (you can email me at bill.rawlinson using gmail) then I’ll send you a copy of my “BaseComponent.cfc”
Sorry it took so long for this reponse.. I just now saw your comment awaiting moderation.
Puc
Hi Bill,
I am trying to create a base component like this but I’m having difficulties.
Could I get a look at your basecomponent to see where may be going wrong.
Thanks
Mike
Hi Bill, I’d really like to see what you are doing in your base cfc. I’ve got a problem with one of my projects where I’ve got a deep nesting issue that throws an error intermittantly. I’d like to see if your memento and uuid comparison functions might help me diagnose the problem. Thanks.