Using the Eclipse CFC Code Generation
So you want to play with the new code generation utilities in the Adobe Flex CF Eclipse Plugin. How do you get started? Well the first step is to head on over to labs.adobe.com and get the plugin. Its a zip file with 4 folders in it. Just drop those 4 folders into the plugins directory of your Eclipse install. Then restart you workbench.
What is that? Nothing appears to have changed? Well lets just make sure we have the RDS view turned on. In the Eclipse menu choose Window->Show View->Other. That will pop up a nice little window with a tree view full of “views” Expand the RDS part of the tree and select “RDS Dataview”. This will add the RDS database view to your workspace. Now jump into your preferences (menu: Window->Preferences….) and select RDS Configuration from the list on the left. In here you can specify the information to connect to your rds service. Click ok to close the preferences window.
Once that is set up you can open expand your host in the rds view. Find a database you would like to play with, and righ click on a table. At the bottom of the menu you will see an option for “ColdFusion Wizards” then select “Create CFC”. If the steps I followed worked for you you will now see a popup that looks like this.
I will let you play with the rest on your own. But its important to note there are 3 types of generation.
- Active Record CFC ( one file per table)
- Bean CFC & DAO CFC ( couple files per table)
- Flex Data Services Assembler CFC’s
The first 2 in the list you can use with general consumption ColdFusion code as well as with flex. As best as i can tell though, the third option is just for use with Flex Data Services.
Ok, thats all for now. Have fun!
Man, you beat me to the post! You must be a-reloadin’ that labs.macromedia.com page! :)
MD
I’m confused – I need a road map with arrows pointing to the download area. Is it the one at <http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs#cf_flexconnect>, drilling down to the ColdFusion/Flex Connectivity link? I’m seeing that this is Windows-only. I just need the JAR package; I have Eclipse 3.2 with the nightly release of CFEclipse so I can’t use the update feature since it only allows you to select the Stable version.
hi Lola,
The RDS plugin is being released by adobe and is managed by them also. It is not currently an integrated part of CFEclipse. If you go to http://labs.adobe.com and follow the links to the download area look for a package called "Download ColdFusion Extensions to Flex Builder 2.0"
That zip file will have a plugins directory with 4 folders. Drop those 4 folders into the plugins directory under your Eclipse install on your computer. You will need to restart Eclipse but then you should be able to follow along with what I have talked about above in my post.
Good Luck.
Got it . . . thanks! This is really cool and I can see it being very, very usefull.
1. Is the CFEclipse team pushing Adobe to create a meaningful debugger so we could build an automated debugger into the tool?
2. The team should also take an integrate CFUnit or build another TDD system and make it standard include with CFE!
We need a complete tool to compete with Visual Studio and Zend Studio. It’s hard to attract developers when our language IDE tools are not as good. We need Adobe to get the vision that the IDE helps sell the language rather than looking at the language to sell the tool. It’s time to pick up the gauntlet of a decent IDE. DW is a nice tool… but for a company that pushes CF as an enterprise tool… there should be an enterprise IDE! (isn’t it great to be passionate about some things)
It would be really nice to have the ability to do text searches inside a directory via RDS also. I haven’t found a good way to do that yet. Only way I see is to create a Project / Working set combination which doesn’t seem to work with RDS.