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Flex 4 & ColdFusion 9 Remoting Recap

December 29th, 2009 Erich Cervantez Leave a comment Go to comments

It’s been a couple of years since I worked with ColdFusion and Flex together, but I remember I always like the combination and chose it for my new little Xuland social networking project I’ve been working on (see previous posts).

I had to remember how the whole Flex-ColdFusion remoting setup would work again and I had to overcome a couple of hurdles. I thought I’d share the experience as it would have helped me get up to speed quickly.

Here’s a quick recap of setting up your Flex application to remote to ColdFusion:

Install ColdFusion (I installed mine to the default C:\ColdFusion9 directory)

In FlexBuilder, create a new Flex project

While creating the project, select an Application server type of “ColdFusion” and check the “Use remote object access service” with the “ColdFusion Flash Remoting” option selected.
.

On the next screen, in my case I’m using a Standalone installation and had to uncheck the “Use default location for local ColdFusion server”. Of course, the root folder was C:\ColdFusion9. I clicked Validate Configuration which validated that the root folder existed.
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I happen to use ColdFusion primarily for access to a MySQL datasource, so I had to setup the datasource in the ColdFusion admin first (this information should be readily available anywhere)

Once the datasource was setup, I first created a value-object (VO) in ColdFusion to represent the object (in this case, a User) I wanted to pass back to the Flex application
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UserVO.cfc:

<cfcomponent output="false" alias="com.xyz.coldfusion.vo.UserVO">
	<cfproperty name="userID" type="numeric"/>
	<cfproperty name="username" type="string"/>
	<cfproperty name="password" type="string"/>
</cfcomponent>

After the VO, I created a data-access object (DAO) to query the datasource for a user and return a UserVO to the calling Flex application
.

<cfcomponent output="yes">
	<cffunction name="getUserByID" 
		access="remote" 
		returntype="com.xyz.coldfusion.vo.UserVO">
 
		<cfargument name="userID" type="numeric" required="yes"> 
 
		<cfquery name="getUser" datasource="xuland">
        	SELECT * 
		FROM tblUsers
		WHERE userID = '#userID#'
		</cfquery>
 
		<cfreturn getUser>
 
	</cffunction>
</cfcomponent>

Back in the Flex project, I setup my RemoteObject tag to point towards the ColdFusion DAO component I created in the last step:
.

<!-- Remote Services -->
<mx:RemoteObject id="userService"
	 destination="ColdFusion"
	 source="com.xyz.coldfusion.dao.UserDAO"
	 showBusyCursor="true">
 
	<mx:method name="getUserByID" 
		   result="resultHandler(event)" 
		   fault="faultHandler(event)"/>
 
</mx:RemoteObject>

Create your result and fault handlers (here we just display an Alert)
.

<fx:Script>
	<![CDATA[
		import mx.controls.Alert;
		import mx.rpc.events.FaultEvent;
		import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
 
		private function resultHandler( event : ResultEvent ) : void
		{
			Alert.show( event.result.toString() );
		}
 
		private function faultHandler( event : FaultEvent ) : void 
		{
			Alert.show( event.fault.faultString );
		}
	]]>
</fx:Script>

Finally create a button or method to call the service:
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1
<mx:Button click="userService.getUserByID( 1 )"/>

Much of this logic may be abstracted off into controllers, delegates, commands or other framework-specific components but this is a fairly simple example of installing, configuring and executing a remote object service call from Flex to ColdFusion.

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