Contents Magic Functions - Getters / Setters Enabling Magic Functions via Admin The Code External Resource

Magic Functions - Getters / Setters

Enabling Magic Functions via Admin

You can enable magic functions in the web / server context by going to:

Enable the settings:

The Code

Once, you've checked and enabled it, we're ready to start with some code. I created person.cfc with the following code:

person.cfc

<cfcomponent>
<cffunction name="init" access="public" output="no" hint="initalization">
<cfreturn this>
</cffunction>
<cffunction name="setage" access="public" output="no" hint="This sets the age">
<cfargument name="value" required="yes" type="numeric">
<cfif arguments.value LT 30>
<cfthrow message="Blah! You're just a young pup!">
<cfelse>
<cfset variables.age = arguments.value>
</cfif>
</cffunction>
<cffunction name="getage" access="public" returntype="string" output="no" hint="This gets the age">
<cfreturn "My age is #variables.age#">
</cffunction>
<cffunction name="dump" access="public" output="no" hint="I'm just here for debugging purposes">
<cfreturn variables>
</cffunction>
</cfcomponent>

So, this is a person object, but I didn't declare age or name anywhere. I did create two age specific functions ( getage() / setage ). Now, I'm going to call my Person component via my index.cfm:

<cfset oPerson = createObject('component','person').init()>
<---  In Railo 3.1.2.015, you can write this as: <cfset oPerson = new person()> --->
<cfdump var="#oPerson#">

My dump:

Now, let's play around a little bit by setting some properties and cfoutput'ing it:

<cfset oPerson.name = "Todd Rafferty">
<cfset oPerson.age = 37>
<cfoutput>#oPerson.name#</cfoutput><---  Result: "Todd Rafferty" --->
<cfoutput>#oPerson.age#</cfoutput><---  Result: Guess? Check below to find out if you're right! --->

So, you can see here that oPerson.age didn't output to just "37", it actually returned "My age is 37" as found in the getage() function. Now, what happens if I try to lie and I say that I'm 29?

<cfset oPerson.age = 29>

The result?

You could further expand on this so that setName() validates that the user actually exists and throws an error if it doesn't.

External Resource

• Mark Drew's blog post on Railo ORM and Magic Functions