At my current company, we do not currently use ORM, but we are evaluating it as a viable option for a new project we are working on.
We are in the middle of converting a legacy app to ColdBox 3.8, and were researching ways of implementing the new ORM features into new applications.
The specific problem at hand is, that we have entities that have some core attributes, but we can also have customized versions that clients implement with extended properties.
So for example, our core app, might have a Person object. But client A, has a customized version, and may add extra features like demographic information (gender, hair color, etc), that the core object will not contain.
Client B, has another version that extends the core object, but with features different from those of client A (favorite movie, favorite food).
The thing is we don’t want to keep writing cfc’s for each, nor constantly changing them each time a client adds a new column. The client has full control over adding or remove a column at any time.
One of the benefits we saw with ORM, was that, with a single command, it could auto-generate its property files.
We were considering just having hibernate create its own property files (the hbmxml files), so that those get generated based on the schema.
The first question is. Is it possible to enable ORM in CF 10 and Coldbox 3.8.x, and just use the hibernate property files, meaning no .cfc beans?
If so, how would we go about that?
If there is no way around creating a CFC entity object, we would need to create them without ies. In our initial tests we have been unable to do “gets” on the attributes of an entity, when there are no CFProperties in the cfc.
Thanks,
Ali