Coming from <cfquery> or queryExecute?

You might be thinking, I don't need an ORM engine. I don't even know what ORM means! I know SQL backwards and forwards so there's nothing an ORM can offer me. Maybe you've had experience with other ORM engines, whether CFML-based or not, and the experience was less that ideal. Why should you consider Quick?

Quick's ORM philosophy comes down to three main points:

1. Give relevant names to important collections of SQL code. (, , etc.)

2. Make queries easy to compose at runtime to get the exact data you want in the most efficient way (, , etc.)

3. Get out of your way when you need or want to write barebones SQL.

Coming from Hibernate?

Quick was built out of lessons learned and persistent challenges in developing complex RDBMS applications using built-in Hibernate ORM in CFML.

• Hibernate ORM error messages often obfuscate the actual cause of the error

  because they are provided directly by the Java classes.

• Complex CFML Hibernate ORM applications can consume significant memory and

  processing resources, making them cost-prohibitive and inefficient when used

  in microservices architecture.

We can do better.

A CFML ORM Engine

Why?

Quick was built out of lessons learned and persistent challenges in developing complex RDBMS applications using built-in Hibernate ORM in CFML.

• Hibernate ORM error messages often obfuscate the actual cause of the error

  because they are provided directly by the Java classes.

• Complex CFML Hibernate ORM applications can consume significant memory and

  processing resources, making them cost-prohibitive and inefficient when used

  in microservices architecture.

• Hibernate ORM is tied to the engine releases. This means that updates come

We can do better.

What?

Quick is an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) written in CFML for CFML. It provides an implementation for working with your database. With it you can map database tables to components, create relationships between components, query and manipulate data, and persist all your changes to your database.

Prerequisites

You need the following configured before using Quick:

• Configure a default datasource in your CFML engine

• ColdBox 4.3+

• Add a mapping for quick in your Application.cfc

See for more details.

Supported Databases

Quick supports all databases supported by .

Example

Here's a "quick" example to whet your appetite.

We'll show the database structure using a . This isn't required to use quick, but it is highly recommended.

Now that you've seen an example, with Quick!

Prior Art, Acknowledgements, and Thanks

Quick is backed by . Without qb, there is no Quick.

Quick is inspired heavily by . Thank you Taylor Otwell and the Laravel community for a great library.

Development of Quick is sponsored by Ortus Solutions. Thank you Ortus Solutions for investing in the future of CFML.

Relationships are the heart of any ORM engine. They let you interact with relational database tables in an object-oriented way.

Quick's relationship engine provides readable relationship types, extendible relations at runtime, eager loading, and much more.

Start by checking out the different relationship types.

The cookbook is a place to show examples of using Quick in practice. Each cookbook entry will include a short description of the problem to solve or use case and one or more code snippets showing the code.

The cookbook is not meant to teach you the basics of Quick or show you the method signatures. That is the purpose of the Guide and API Docs, respectively. The cookbook is meant to show you advanced and specific use cases.

Additionally, this is a great place to contribute to Quick! If you have solved a particular use case, send in a pull request and add it to the cookbook! We only ask that you take the time to simplify your example as much as you can. This usually means removing any custom naming convention for your attributes, tables, and entities.

3.1.7

• Correct jQuery link in test runner.

3.1.6

• Allow expressions in basic where clauses.

• Fix delete naming collision.

3.1.5

• Add an alias to with to QuickBuilder.

3.1.4

• Fix a stack overflow on nested relationship checks.

3.1.3

• Configured tables (.from) are now used for qualifying columns.

3.1.2

• Remove unnecessary nesting in compare queries.

3.1.1

• Fix when using "OR" combinators.

3.1.0

• Add support for JSON using a new JsonCast@quick component.

3.0.4

• Compatibility updates for ColdBox 6

3.0.3

• Optimize caching

3.0.2

• Apply during .

3.0.1

• Account for null values in .

• Swap structAppend order for a Lucee bug in mementifier integration.

3.0.0

BREAKING CHANGES

Please see the for more information on these changes.

• Drop support for Lucee 4.5 and Adobe ColdFusion 11.

• Virtual Inheritance (using a quick annotation instead of extending quick.models.BaseEntity) has been removed. It was hardly used, and removing it allows us to simplify some of the code paths.

• accessors="true" is now required on every entity. This is similar to above where requiring it allows us to simplify the codebase immensely. A helpful error message will be thrown if

Other Changes

• for memento transformations.

• Use to automatically convert queries to mementos.

• Automatically-generated .

• Add error message for defaulting key values.

2.5.0

• Define per entity.

2.4.0

• Apply custom setters when hydrating from the database. (Reverted in 2.5.3 for unintended consequences with things like password hashing.)

• This allows you to use scopes to perform query functions and return values. (If you do not want to return a custom value, return the QueryBuilder instance or nothing.)

• Improve error messages for not loaded entities.

2.3.0

2.2.0

• (first and find methods)

2.1.0

• Mapping foreign keys for relationships is now optional

delete

You can delete an entity by calling the delete method on it.

To assist you in migrating from CBORM, Quick ships with a small compatibility shim. To use it, have your entity extend quick.models.CBORMCompatEntity. This will map common CBORM methods to their Quick counterparts as well as provide a partial CriteriaBuilder shim. The compatibility shim does not cover differences in properties or relationships.

Entity / Service Methods

• list

Relationships can be used in two ways.

The first is as a getter. Calling user.getPosts() will execute the relationship, cache the result, and return it.

The second is as a relationship. Calling user.posts() returns a Relationship instance to retrieve the posts that can be further constrained. A Relationship is backed by qb as well, so feel free to call any qb method to further constrain the relationship.

You can also call the other Quick fetch methods: first, firstOrFail, find, and findOrFail

Sometimes you want to use a different value in your code than is stored in your database. Perhaps you want to enforce that setting a password always is hashed with BCrypt. Maybe you have a Date value object that you want wrapping each of your dates. You can accomplish this using custom getters and setters.

A custom getter or setter is simply a function in your entity.

To retrieve the attribute value fetched from the database, call retrieveAttribute passing in the name of the attribute.

To set an attribute for saving to the database, call assignAttribute passing in the name and the value.

component extends="quick.models.BaseEntity" accessors="true" {

    property name="bcrypt" inject="@BCrypt";

    function setPassword( value ) {
        return assignAttribute( "password", bcrypt.hashPassword( value ) );
    }

    function getCreatedDate( value ) {
        return dateFormat( retrieveAttribute( "createdDate" ), "DD MMM YYYY" );
    }

}

Collections are what are returned when calling get or all on an entity. By default, it returns an array. Every entity can override its newCollection method and return a custom collection. This method accepts an array of entities and should return your custom collection.

QuickCollection is a custom collection included in Quick as an extra component. It is a specialized version of . It smooths over the various CFML engines to provide an extendible, reliable array wrapper with functional programming methods. You may be familiar with methods like map (ArrayMap), filter (ArrayFilter), or reduce (ArrayReduce

Configure a default datasource in your CFML engine

You can do this any way you'd like: through the web admin, in

3.0.0

Adobe ColdFusion 11 and Lucee 4.5 are no longer supported

Please migrate to a supported engine.

To order by a relationship field, you will use a dot-delimited syntax.

The last item in the dot-delimited string should be an attribute on the related entity.

Nested relationships are also supported. Continue to chain relationships in your dot-delimited string until arriving at the desired entity. Remember to end with the attribute to order by.

If you desire to be explicit, you can use the orderByRelated method, which is what is being called under the hood.

Usage

A hasMany relationship is a one-to-many relationship. For instance, a User may have multiple Posts.

The first value passed to hasMany is a WireBox mapping to the related entity.

Quick determines the foreign key of the relationship based on the entity name and key values. In this case, the Post entity is assumed to have a userId foreign key. You can override this by passing a foreign key in as the second argument:

If your parent entity does not use id as its primary key, or you wish to join the child entity to a different column, you may pass a third argument to the belongsTo method specifying your parent table's custom key.

The inverse of hasMany is .

Inserting & Updating

There are two ways to add an entity to a hasMany relationship. Both mirror the for entities.

save

You can call the save method on the relationship passing in an entity to relate.

This will add the User entity's id as a foreign key in the Post and save the Post to the database.

Note: the save method is called on the posts relationship, not the getPosts collection.

saveMany

You can also add many entities in a hasMany relationship by calling saveMany. This method takes an array of key values or entities and will associate each of them with the base entity.

create

Use the create method to create and save a related entity directly through the relationship.

This example will have the same effect as the previous example.

Removing

Removing a hasMany relationship is handled in two ways: either by using the dissociate method on the side of the relationship or by deleting the side of the relationship.

Relationship Setter

You can also influence the associated entities by calling "set" & relationshipName and passing in an array of entities or key values.

After running this code, this user would only have two posts, the posts with ids 2 and 4. Any other posts would now be disassociated with this user. Likely your database will be guarding against creating these orphan records. Admittedly, this method is not as likely to be used as the others, but it does exist if it solves your use case.

Signature

Returns a HasMany relationship between this entity and the entity defined by relationName.

Visualizer

What's the difference between `posts()` and `getPosts()`?

Answered by Eric Peterson

When you define a relationship you name the function without a get in front of it. When calling a relationship with get preceding it, Quick loads the relationship and executes the query. You are returned either a single entity (or null) or an array of entities.

When you call the relationship function you get back an instance of a Quick Relationship component. This component is configured based on the entity that created it and the attributes configured in the relationship call. You can think of a relationship component as a super-charged query. In fact, you can call other Quick and qb methods on the relationship object. This is one way to restrict the results you get back.

For instance, perhaps you want to retrieve a specific Post by its id. In this case, you want the Post to be found only if it belongs to the User. You could add a constraint to a Post query on the foreign key userId like so:

Another way to write this is by leveraging existing relationships:

Let's disect this. At first glance it may look like it is just a matter of style and preference. But the power behind the relationship approach is that it encapsulates the logic to define the relationship. Remember that relationships don't have to only define foreign keys. They can define any custom query logic and give a name to it. They can even build on each other:

You see here that we have now named an important concept to our domain - a published post. Let's take this one step further and name the query logic on the Post entity itself.

When do I use a scope method and when do I use a normal method?

I keep getting a `QuickEntityNotLoaded` exception. What is the difference between a loaded entity and an unloaded entity?

How can I add a subselect field to my entity?

How can I add a computed field to my entity, like from a SQL CASE statement?

How can I always add a subselect or computed field to my queries?

Usage

A hasOne relationship is a "one-to-one" relationship. For instance, a User entity might have an UserProfile entity attached to it.

The first value passed to hasOne is a WireBox mapping to the related entity.

Quick determines the foreign key of the relationship based on the entity name and key values. In this case, the UserProfile entity is assumed to have a userId foreign key. You can override this by passing a foreign key in as the second argument:

If your parent entity does not use id as its primary key, or you wish to join the child entity to a different column, you may pass a third argument to the belongsTo method specifying your parent table's custom key.

The inverse of hasOne is . It is important to choose the right relationship for your database structure. hasOne assumes that the related model has the foreign key for the relationship.

withDefault

HasOne relationships can be configured to return a default entity if no entity is found. This is done by calling withDefault on the relationship object.

Called this way will return a new unloaded entity with no data. You can also specify any default attributes data by passing in a struct of data to withDefault.

Signature

Returns a HasOne relationship between this entity and the entity defined by relationName.

Visualizer

Quick allows you to hook in to multiple points in the entity lifecycle. If the event is on the component, you do not need to prefix it with quick. If you are listening to an interception point, include quick at the beginning.

quickInstanceReady

Fired after dependency injection has been performed on the entity and the metadata has been inspected.

interceptData structure

quickPreLoad

Fired before attempting to load an entity from the database.

interceptData structure

quickPostLoad

Fired after loading an entity from the database.

interceptData structure

quickPreSave

Fired before saving an entity to the database.

This method is called for both insert and update actions.

interceptData structure

quickPostSave

Fired after saving an entity to the database.

This method is called for both insert and update actions.

interceptData structure

quickPreInsert

Fired before inserting an entity into the database.

interceptData structure

quickPostInsert

Fired after inserting an entity into the database.

interceptData structure

quickPreUpdate

Fired before updating an entity in the database.

interceptData structure

quickPostUpdate

Fired after updating an entity in the database.

interceptData structure

quickPreDelete

Fired before deleting a entity from the database.

interceptData structure

quickPostDelete

Fired after deleting a entity from the database.

interceptData structure

The Problem

Let's imagine a scenario where you are displaying a list of posts. You fetch the posts:

And start looping through them:

When you visit the page, though, you notice it takes a while to load. You take a look at your SQL console and you've executed 26 queries for this one page! What?!?

Turns out that each time you loop through a post to display its author's username you are executing a SQL query to retreive that author. With 25 posts this becomes 25 SQL queries plus one initial query to get the posts. This is where the N+1 problem gets its name.

So what is the solution? Eager Loading.

Eager Loading means to load all the needed users for the posts in one query rather than separate queries and then stitch the relationships together. With Quick you can do this with one method call.

The Solution

with

You can eager load a relationship with the with method call.

with takes one parameter, the name of the relationship to load. Note that this is the name of the function, not the entity name. For example:

To eager load the User in the snippet above you would call pass author to the with method.

For this operation, only two queries will be executed:

Quick will then stitch these relationships together so when you call post.getAuthor() it will use the fetched relationship value instead of going to the database.

Nested Relationships

You can eager load nested relationships using dot notation. Each segment must be a valid relationship name.

You can eager load multiple relationships by passing an array of relation names to with or by calling with multiple times.

Constraining Eager Loaded Relationships

In most cases when you want to constrain an eager loaded relationship, the better approach is to create a new relationship.

You can eager load either option.

Occassionally that decision needs to be dynamic. For example, maybe you only want to eager load the posts created within a timeframe defined by a user. To do this, pass a struct instead of a string to the with function. The key should be the name of the relationship and the value should be a function. This function will accept the related entity as its only argument. Here is an example:

If you need to load nested relationships with constraints you can call with in your constraint callback to continue eager loading relationships.

load

Finally, you can postpone eager loading until needed by using the load method on QuickCollection. load has the same function signature as with. QuickCollection is the object returned for all Quick queries that return more than one record. Read more about it in .

Debugging a Single Query

toSQL

Usage

A belongsToThrough relationship is either a many-to-one relationship. It is used when you want to access a related, owning entity through one or more intermediate entities. For instance, a Post may belong to a Team via a User.

The only value needed for belongsToThrough is an array of relationship function names to walk through to get to the related entity. The first relationship function name in the array must exist on the current entity. Each subsequent function name must exist on the related entity of the previous relationship result. For our previous example, author must be a relationship function on Post. team must then be a relationship function on the related entity resulting from calling Post.author(). This returns a belongsTo relationship where the related entity is User. So, User must have a team relationship function. That is the end of the relationship function names array, so the related entity resulting from calling User.team() is our final entity which is Team.

This approach can scale to as many related entities as you need. For instance, let's expand the previous example to include an Office that houses many Teams.

withDefault

HasOneThrough relationships can be configured to return a default entity if no entity is found. This is done by calling withDefault on the relationship object.

Called this way will return a new unloaded entity with no data. You can also specify any default attributes data by passing in a struct of data to withDefault.

Signature

Usage

A polymorphicHasMany relationship is a one-to-many relationship. This relationship is used when an entity can belong to multiple types of entities. The classic example for this type of relationship is Posts, Videos, and Comments.

The first value passed to polymophicHasMany is a WireBox mapping to the related entity.

The second value is a prefix for the polymorphic type. A common convention where is to add able to the end of the entity name, though this is not automatically done. In our example, this prefix is commentable. This tells quick to look for a commentable_type and a commentable_id column in our Comment entity. It stores our entity's mapping as the _type and our entity's primary key value as the _id.

The inverse of polymophicHasMany is polymorphicBelongsTo.

Signature

Returns a polymorphicHasMany relationship between this entity and the entity defined by relationName.

Visualizer

Usage

A belongsTo relationship is a many-to-one relationship. For instance, a Post may belong to a User.

The first value passed to belongsTo is a WireBox mapping to the related entity.

Quick determines the foreign key of the relationship based on the entity name and key values. In this case, the Post entity is assumed to have a userId foreign key. You can override this by passing a foreign key in as the second argument:

If your parent entity does not use id as its primary key, or you wish to join the child entity to a different column, you may pass a third argument to the belongsTo method specifying your parent table's custom key.

The inverse of belongsTo is or .

Updating

To update a belongsTo relationship, use the associate method. associate takes the entity to associate as the only argument.

Removing

To remove a belongsTo relationship, use the dissociate method.

Relationship Setter

You can also influence the associated entities by calling "set" & relationshipName and passing in an entity or key value.

After executing this code, the post would be updated in the database to be associated with the user with an id of 1.

withDefault

BelongsTo relationships can be configured to return a default entity if no entity is found. This is done by calling withDefault on the relationship object.

Called this way will return a new unloaded entity with no data. You can also specify any default attributes data by passing in a struct of data to withDefault.

Signature

Returns a BelongsTo relationship between this entity and the entity defined by relationName.

Visualizer

getMemento

The memento pattern is an established pattern in ColdBox apps. A memento in this case is a simple representation of your entity using arrays, structs, and simple values.

For instance, the following example shows a User entity and its corresponding memento:

Quick bundles in the excellent Mementifier library to handle converting entities to mementos. This gives you excellent control over serialization using a this.memento struct on the entity and passing in arguments to the getMemento function.

this.memento

By default, Quick includes all defined attributes as includes. You can change this or add other Mementifier options by defining your own this.memento struct on your entity. Your custom this.memento struct will be merged with Quick's default, so you can only define what changes you need.

Here is the default Quick memento struct. It is inside the instanceReady() lifecycle method in this example because retrieveAttributeNames() relies on the entity being wired (though not loaded); it is not otherwise necessary to put this.memento inside instanceReady().

getMemento Arguments

You can also control the serialization of a memento at call time using Mementifier's getMemento arguments.

Custom getMemento

If this does not give you the control you need, you can further modify the memento by overriding the getMemento function on your entity. In this case, a $getMemento function will be available which is the Mementifier function.

asMemento

Sometimes when retrieving entities or executing a Quick query, you already know you want mementos back. You can skip the step of calling getMemento yourself or mapping over the array of results returned by calling asMemento before executing the query. asMemento takes the same arguments that getMemento does. It will pass those arguments on and convert your entities to mementos after executing the query. This works for all the query execution methods - find, first, get, paginate, etc.

$renderData

The $renderData method is a special method for ColdBox. When returning a model from a handler, this method will be called and the value returned will be used as the serialized response. This let's you simply return an entity from a handler for your API. By default this will call getMemento().

QuickCollection also defines a $renderData method, which will delegate the call to each entity in the collection and return the array of serialized entities.

Usage

A belongsToMany relationship is a many-to-many relationship. For instance, a User may have multiple Permissions while a Permission can belong to multiple Users.

Usage

A polymorphicBelongsTo relationship is a many-to-one relationship. This relationship is used when an entity can belong to multiple types of entities. The classic example for this type of relationship is Posts, Videos, and Comments. For instance, a Comment

Usage

A hasOneThrough relationship is either a many-to-one or a one-to-one relationship. It is used when you want to access a related entity through one or more intermediate entities. For instance, a Team may have one latest Post through a User.

The only value needed for hasOneThrough is an array of relationship function names to walk through to get to the related entity. The first relationship function name in the array must exist on the current entity. Each subsequent function name must exist on the related entity of the previous relationship result. For our previous example, members must be a relationship function on Team. posts must then be a relationship function on the related entity resulting from calling Team.members(). This returns a hasMany relationship where the related entity is User. So, User must have a posts relationship function. That is the end of the relationship function names array, so the related entity resulting from calling User.posts() is our final entity which is Post

This approach can scale to as many related entities as you need. For instance, let's expand the previous example to include an Office that houses many Teams.

withDefault

HasOneThrough relationships can be configured to return a default entity if no entity is found. This is done by calling withDefault on the relationship object.

Called this way will return a new unloaded entity with no data. You can also specify any default attributes data by passing in a struct of data to withDefault.

Signature

save

Updates are handled identically to inserts when using the save method. The only difference is that instead of starting with a new entity, we start with an existing entity.