ORM Model data Validation in ColdFusion 9

As I have blogged about in Part I and Part II data validation is just not where it needs to be yet. I think Adobe has taken a nice stab at it but until some things change your probably going to need to roll your own or use a framework that already exists. Before we look at some potential solutions I want to take a look at some examples from outside of the ColdFusion world.

In the Java world when you use Hibernate there is a built in validation framework called Hibernate Validator. In your model you setup your constraints using annotations. public class Address { @NotNull private String line1; private String line2; private String zip; private String state; @Length(max = 20) @NotNull private String country; @Range(min = -2, max = 50, message = "Floor out of range") public int floor; ... } In grails you can setup constraints pretty easily. class User { ... static constraints = { login(size:5..15, blank:false, unique:true) password(size:5..15, blank:false) email(email:true, blank:false) age(min:18, nullable:false) } } In python (django) you can setup your constraints when you declare the property. from django.db import models class Person(models.Model): first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30) last_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)

I hope you are starting to see a pattern here. Your model only needs to do 2 things. First you need to setup your properties and second you need to define some constraints on those properties. With that In mind I started a validation framework that would do just that in ColdFusion 9. I based this project off of Hibernate Validator so sticking with what it does we can just setup our constraints using annotations. /** * @output false * @accessors true */ component { /** * @display First Name * @NotEmpty */ property string firstname; /** * @display Last Name * @NotEmpty */ property string lastname; } I am going to start a whole new series related to this but for now you can check out the project page at http://hyrule.riaforge.org. I hope going forward the engineers find a way to include Hibernate Validator in ColdFusion. That would be one of my enhancement requests but until then you can always check out my project! Thoughts?