Ask a Jedi: Moving existing application code into Model-Glue

May 27, 2007 coldfusion

(This post is more than 2 years old.)

Rony sent me some interesting questions today concerning existing code and Model-Glue. He sent two questions. His second question was easier so I'll address that one first:

I also have several variables, objects (such as DAO's, gateways) and structs inside stored in my application scope. How I can integrate this with MG?

Model-Glue makes this rather simple. All controllers (you should have at least one per application) are automatically stored in the Application scope. This may not be 100% obvious as you don't see the Application scope used in your own, but it is indeed cached there. In fact, if you use the Model-Glue application template, you will see this in the Controller.cfc init method:


<!--- Controllers are in the application scope:  Put any application startup code here. --->

All you need to do is place your Model CFCs here to cache them. An example:


<cfset variables.userModel = createObject("myapp.model.user")>

Because the controller itself is cached, this CFC will also be cached.

Now for his second question:

I currently have an application.cfc in which i have code for each of the functions inside this component, onrequeststart(), on applicationstart() etc. How can I integrate this into MG?

There are a few answers to this. First off - Model-Glue will automatically call onRequestStart and onRequestEnd in each of your controller CFCs. So if you had 4 controllers, you actually get 4 different ways to run something on the start and end of each request.

As for onApplicationStart(), I kind of covered this in the first portion. The init method of each controller is run when the controller is created. This acts like a virtual onApplicationStart, and again, you have one for each controller. This is both good and bad. On one hand - I like how Model-Glue allows me to focus on each controller and it's own application startup/request startup work. On the flip side, that makes it a bit more difficult to see - quickly - exactly what is going on in your startup code. It's not impossible of course. You just need to look at multiple files.

As a side question - do you think it makes sense for Model-Glue to have a site wide Application and Request startup handler?