Chapter 3. Power CFCs and Web Forms

In this chapter, we will learn to move forward from making our code work to making it interesting to write and reuse. We could call this a "power CFC". Power is doing away with the old practice of copying and pasting code again and again with some minor edits in the pasted code. Here, we will learn to reuse the CFC code to make it much simpler.

There used to be long pages of what we called "spaghetti code" because the page would go on and on. You had to follow the conditional logic by going through the page up and down, and then had to understand how things worked. This made writing, updating, and debugging a difficult task even for highly-skilled developers. CFCs allow you to encapsulate some part of the logic of a page inside an object. Encapsulation simply means packaged for reuse inside something. CFCs are the object-packaging method used in ColdFusion.

Database interaction is quite universally wrapped in CFCs. We will look at database interaction as our primary example of power CFCs in the context of working with "web forms". If you are new to development, then these concepts will make it easier for you. Here is an overview of what this chapter contains:

• The practice of protecting access to CFC methods
• The working of web forms
• Managing multiple products through common forms for listing, editing, and adding data
• Improving the page flow, also known as work flow
• Returning messages to the user to know things are working
• Learning the power of inheritance
• Simplifying by passing array collections, rather than manual line-by-line passing of the variable values