My FB 5.5+ Content Pulled a David Blaine!
FB 5.5+ for Model-Gluers
For any of you Model-gluers out there who are dabbling in Fusebox 5.5+ (which I happen to be for a current client project), I came across a hair-pulling situation that I wanted to share with you in the hopes that you'll not have to endure the same.
The symptom: you wrote a perfectly good controller method that is being called and, according to the debugging, is rendering all of your content just fine. But, your final page returns completely empty! It's just gone, not there, not even a single line in your page's source. Poof! It pulled a David Blaine. After spending more time on this than I care to admit, following are the details of the issue and the solution.
The Cause and Solution
You know how in your MG controllers and model CFCs you're in the habit of typing out all of your attributes and their values when declaring a new CFFUNCTION (such as, "<cffunction name="getEntityDetails" output="false" access="public">")? And, you know how in MG, 99.9% of the time, your methods don't need to render any output and so you set the output attribute to "false" just out of habit? Well, if you're using FB 5.5+ (at least in the 'no xml' mode, which is what I'm doing), you have to be mindful NOT to set the output attribute to false if your method is going to render any page output (which is the way to do it in FB 5.5+ in the 'no-xml' mode). You may be saying "duh, if it's rendering output of COURSE you wouldn't set output="false"! But, typically if a method is going to render output, it's going to do so with either cfoutput tags or the like, which would trigger your programmer mind to remind you to change the output attribute. In the approach that FB 5.5+ takes to do this, however, the natural mechanism that would trigger your mind to make the output value change isn't tripped, because we're just not used to seeing it done that way (eg; <cfset myFusebox.do( action="layout.main_template" ) />). At least it didn't trip mine.
Here's an example of a non-working and a working FB 5.5+ method that performs my login functionality and then renders the appropriate display page:
Non-Functioning method:
Functioning method:
So, even though FB 5.5+ can be used in an MVC manner, and even though many of the ways of thinking you've grown accustomed to with Model Glue do translate directly over to FB 5.5+, SOME DO NOT. Just remain mindful of this fact as you take the FB 5.5+ journey and you should be able to avoid hitting dead ends such as this one.
Doug out.
The symptom: you wrote a perfectly good controller method that is being called and, according to the debugging, is rendering all of your content just fine. But, your final page returns completely empty! It's just gone, not there, not even a single line in your page's source. Poof! It pulled a David Blaine. After spending more time on this than I care to admit, following are the details of the issue and the solution.
The Cause and Solution
You know how in your MG controllers and model CFCs you're in the habit of typing out all of your attributes and their values when declaring a new CFFUNCTION (such as, "<cffunction name="getEntityDetails" output="false" access="public">")? And, you know how in MG, 99.9% of the time, your methods don't need to render any output and so you set the output attribute to "false" just out of habit? Well, if you're using FB 5.5+ (at least in the 'no xml' mode, which is what I'm doing), you have to be mindful NOT to set the output attribute to false if your method is going to render any page output (which is the way to do it in FB 5.5+ in the 'no-xml' mode). You may be saying "duh, if it's rendering output of COURSE you wouldn't set output="false"! But, typically if a method is going to render output, it's going to do so with either cfoutput tags or the like, which would trigger your programmer mind to remind you to change the output attribute. In the approach that FB 5.5+ takes to do this, however, the natural mechanism that would trigger your mind to make the output value change isn't tripped, because we're just not used to seeing it done that way (eg; <cfset myFusebox.do( action="layout.main_template" ) />). At least it didn't trip mine.
Here's an example of a non-working and a working FB 5.5+ method that performs my login functionality and then renders the appropriate display page:
Non-Functioning method:
<cffunction name="login" returntype="void" output="false">
<cfargument name="myFusebox" />
<cfargument name="event" />
[code to perform login logic here]
<cfset myFusebox.do( action="display.dspHome",contentvariable="body" ) />
<cfset myFusebox.do( action="layout.main_template" ) />
</cffunction>
<cfargument name="myFusebox" />
<cfargument name="event" />
[code to perform login logic here]
<cfset myFusebox.do( action="display.dspHome",contentvariable="body" ) />
<cfset myFusebox.do( action="layout.main_template" ) />
</cffunction>
Functioning method:
<cffunction name="login">
<cfargument name="myFusebox" />
<cfargument name="event" />
[code to perform login logic here]
<cfset myFusebox.do( action="display.dspHome",contentvariable="body" ) />
<cfset myFusebox.do( action="layout.main_template" ) />
</cffunction>
<cfargument name="myFusebox" />
<cfargument name="event" />
[code to perform login logic here]
<cfset myFusebox.do( action="display.dspHome",contentvariable="body" ) />
<cfset myFusebox.do( action="layout.main_template" ) />
</cffunction>
So, even though FB 5.5+ can be used in an MVC manner, and even though many of the ways of thinking you've grown accustomed to with Model Glue do translate directly over to FB 5.5+, SOME DO NOT. Just remain mindful of this fact as you take the FB 5.5+ journey and you should be able to avoid hitting dead ends such as this one.
Doug out.