Using the event handling features in ORM in ColdFusion 9 makes it easy to automatically add audit information such as last updated and last modified by to all objects, well technically tables, in the database.  I'm about to launch my first ColdFusion 9 application and the technique below has worked well and sped up development.

Step 1: Decide on audit colum names

There really is no right or wrong way here.  Go for something readable and easily understandable (for those lucky future developers who will look at your code!).  Once you pick them add them as properties to your CFC:

Step 2: Turn on Event Handling and Hander

In your Application.cfc in addition to ormEnabled=true, turn on event handling and an event handler like so:

this.ormsettings = { eventHandling=true, eventHandler="myEventHandler" };

The eventHandler points to a valid CFC "myEventHandler.cfc" which is what we will create next.

Step 3: Create an Event Handler CFC (See I told ya!)

Step 4: Add code to preInsert and preUpdate functions

The preInsert and preUpdate functions in the event handler CFC are the last functions that get run before ColdFusion hands over to Hibernate for persistence (a fancy way of saying saving to database).  All of the functions in eventHandler take in the entity as an argument called entity (if you are new to cfscript within the parenthesis its saying a type of any and an argument called entity).  We simply call the various functions and pass in the values.  I found I got an error at first matching the session userID to createBy and lastModifiedBy and needed to use JavaCast.  [Update Feb 6 '10: This bug is scheduled to be fixed in 9.0.1] After making a change to myEventHandler.cfc run ormReload() (I've gotten used to having this in onRequestStart and commenting it out when not needed).

The preUpdate function is very similar except just has the setLastModifiedBy and setDateModified calls.  If all your entities don't have the audit properties/columns use this technique for checking if the function exists.

Lets see it in action.

Using the Team object from above:

Thats all the code needed.  Here's a screenshot of the database after insert that shows all the audit data.

Underneath the hood cfwindow uses ExtJS to make modal windows.  This means with a little bit of JavaScript its possible to add effects to a cfwindow.  First lets create a cfwindow:

Nothing special here.  To tie it in with some ExtJS effects we need to get at its inners using the ColdFusion.Window.getWindowObject() function.  In the example below once we get the window object we add a listener to it using the shorthand ExtJs notation of "on" to look for when the mouse enters and leaves the window.  When the mouse enters we log to the console the id of the element (it can be useful to know the id of it) and then perform a highlight effect on the windowContent div.  When the mouse leaves we hide the window.

Thats it!  ExtJs has a bunch of cool effects that can be applied to an element.

Here's a short screencast showing the code above in action: