CFWheels's built in model provides your application with some simple and powerful functionality for interacting with databases. To get started, you will make some simple configurations, call some functions within your controllers, and that's it. Best yet, you will rarely ever need to write SQL code to get those redundant CRUD tasks out of the way.

Our Sample Application: User Management

We'll learn by building part of a sample user management application. This tutorial will teach you the basics of setting up a resource that interacts with the CFWheels ORM.

Setting up the Data Source

By default, CFWheels will connect to a data source wheels.fw. To change this default behavior, open the file at app/config/settings.cfm. In a fresh install of CFWheels, you'll see the follwing code:

<cfscript>
	/*
		Use this file to configure your application.
		You can also use the environment specific files (e.g. app/config/production/settings.cfm) to override settings set here.
		Don't forget to issue a reload request (e.g. reload=true) after making changes.
		See https://guides.cfwheels.org/2.5.0/v/3.0.0-snapshot/working-with-cfwheels/configuration-and-defaults for more info.
	*/

	/*
		You can change the "wheels.fw" value from the two functions below to set your datasource.
		You can change the the value for the "dataSourceName" to set a default datasource to be used throughout your application.
		You can also change the value for the "coreTestDataSourceName" to set your testing datasource.
	*/
	set(coreTestDataSourceName="wheels.fw");
	set(dataSourceName="wheels.fw");
    // set(dataSourceUserName="");
    // set(dataSourcePassword="");

	/*
		If you comment out the following line, CFWheels will try to determine the URL rewrite capabilities automatically.
		The "URLRewriting" setting can bet set to "on", "partial" or "off".
		To run with "partial" rewriting, the "cgi.path_info" variable needs to be supported by the web server.
		To run with rewriting set to "on", you need to apply the necessary rewrite rules on the web server first.
	*/
	set(URLRewriting="On");

	// Reload your application with ?reload=true&password=wheels.fw
	set(reloadPassword="wheels.fw");

	// CLI-Appends-Here
</cfscript>

These lines provide CFWheels with the necessary information about the data source, URL rewriting, and reload password for your application, and include the appropriate values. This may include values for dataSourceName, dataSourceUserName, and dataSourcePassword. More on URL rewriting and reload password later.

set(dataSourceName="back2thefuture");
// set(dataSourceUserName="marty");
// set(dataSourcePassword="mcfly");

Our Sample Data Structure

CFWheels supports MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and H2. It doesn't matter which DBMS you use for this tutorial; we will all be writing the same CFML code to interact with the database. CFWheels does everything behind the scenes that needs to be done to work with each DBMS.

That said, here's a quick look at a table that you'll need in your database, named users:

Note a couple things about this users table:

1. The table name is plural.

2. The table has an auto-incrementing primary key named id.

These are database conventions used by CFWheels. This framework strongly encourages that everyone follow convention over configuration. That way everyone is doing things mostly the same way, leading to less maintenance and training headaches down the road.

Fortunately, there are ways of going outside of these conventions when you really need it. But let's learn the conventional way first. Sometimes you need to learn the rules before you can know how to break them.

Creating Routes for the users Resource

Next, open the file at app/config/routes.cfm. You will see contents similar to this:

mapper()
    .wildcard()
    .root(method = "get")
.end();

We are going to create a section of our application for listing, creating, updating, and deleting user records. In CFWheels routing, this requires a plural resource, which we'll name users.

Because a users resource is more specific than the "generic" routes provided by CFWheels, we'll list it first in the chain of mapper method calls:

mapper()
    .resources("users")
    .wildcard()
    .root(method = "get")
.end();

This will create URL endpoints for creating, reading, updating, and deleting user records:

• Name is referenced in your code to tell CFWheels where to point forms and links.

• Method is the HTTP verb that CFWheels listens for to match up the request.

• URL Path is the URL that CFWheels listens for to match up the request.

Creating Users

First, let's create a simple form for adding a new user to the users table. To do this, we will use CFWheels's form helper functions. CFWheels includes a whole range of functions that simplifies all of the tasks that you need to display forms and communicate errors to the user.

Creating the Form

Now create a new file in app/views/users called new.cfm. This will contain the view code for our simple form.

Next, add these lines of code to the new file:

<cfoutput>

<h1>New User</h1>

#startFormTag(route="users")#
    <div>
        #textField(objectName="user", property="username", label="Username")#
    </div>

    <div>
        #textField(objectName="user", property="email", label="Email")#
    </div>

    <div>
        #passwordField(
            objectName="user",
            property="passwd",
            label="Password"
        )#
    </div>

    <div>#submitTag()#</div>
#endFormTag()#

</cfoutput>

Form Helpers

What we've done here is use form helpers to generate all of the form fields necessary for creating a new user in our database. It may feel a little strange using functions to generate form elements, but it will soon become clear why we're doing this. Trust us on this one… you'll love it!

To generate the form tag's action attribute, the startFormTag() function takes parameters similar to the linkTo()function that we introduced in the Beginner Tutorial: Hello World tutorial. We can pass in controller, action, key, and other route- and parameter-defined URLs just like we do with linkTo().

To end the form, we use the endFormTag() function. Easy enough.

The textField() and passwordField() helpers are similar. As you probably guessed, they create <input> elements with type="text" and type="password", respectively. And the submitTag() function creates an <input type="submit" /> element.

One thing you'll notice is the textField() and passwordField() functions accept arguments called objectName and property. As it turns out, this particular view code will throw an error because these functions are expecting an object named user. Let's fix that.

Supplying the Form with Data

All of the form helper calls in our view specify an objectName argument with a reference to a variable named user. That means that we need to supply our view code with an object called user. Because the controller is responsible for providing the views with data, we'll set it there.

Create a new ColdFusion component at app/controllers/Users.cfc.

As it turns out, our controller needs to provide the view with a blank user object (whose instance variable will also be called user in this case). In our new action, we will use the model() function to generate a new instance of the user model.

To get a blank set of properties in the model, we'll also call the generated model's new() method.

component extends="Controller" {
    function config(){}

    function new() {
        user = application.wo.model("user").new();
    }
}

Notice how we have prefixed the model() function with application.wo. This is because, in CFWheels, all the global functions and functions for your controller reside in the application.wo structure. So, whenever you need to call a global function or a function for your controller, you have to prefix them with application.wo. You will see its use throughout the documentation wherever required.

CFWheels will automatically know that we're talking about the users database table when we instantiate a user model. The convention: database tables are plural and their corresponding CFWheels models are singular.

Why is our model name singular instead of plural? When we're talking about a single record in the users database, we represent that with an individual model object. So the users table contains many user objects. It just works better in conversation.

The Generated Form

Now when we run the URL at http://localhost/users/new, we'll see the form with the fields that we defined.

The HTML generated by your application will look something like this:

<h1>New User</h1>

<form action="/users" method="post">
    <div>
        <label for="user-username">
            Username
            <input id="user-username" type="text" value="" name="user&#x5b;username&#x5d;">
        </label>
    </div>

    <div>
        <label for="user-email">
            Email
            <input id="user-email" type="text" value="" name="user&#x5b;email&#x5d;">
        </label>
    </div>

    <div>
        <label for="user-passwd">
            Password
            <input id="user-passwd" type="password" value="" name="user&#x5b;passwd&#x5d;">
        </label>
    </div>

    <div><input value="Save&#x20;changes" type="submit"></div>
</form>

So far we have a fairly well-formed, accessible form, without writing a bunch of repetitive markup.

Handling the Form Submission

Next, we'll code the create action in the controller to handle the form submission and save the new user to the database.

A basic way of doing this is using the model object's create() method:

function create() {
    user = application.wo.model("user").create(params.user);

    redirectTo(
        route="users",
        success="User created successfully."
    );
}

Because we used the objectName argument in the fields of our form, we can access the user data as a struct in the params struct.

There are more things that we can do in the create action to handle validation, but let's keep it simple in this tutorial.

Listing Users

Notice that our create action above redirects the user to the users index route using the redirectTo() function. We'll use this action to list all users in the system with "Edit" links. We'll also provide a link to the "New User" form that we just coded.

First, let's get the data that the listing needs. Create an action named index in the users controller like so:

function index() {
    users = application.wo.model("user").findAll(order="username");
}

This call to the model's findAll() method will return a query object of all users in the system. By using the method's order argument, we're also telling the database to order the records by username.

In the view at app/views/users/index.cfm, it's as simple as looping through the query and outputting the data

<cfoutput>

<h1>Users</h1>

<p>#linkTo(text="New User", route="newUser")#</p>

<table>
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th>Username</th>
            <th>Email</th>
            <th colspan="2"></th>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <cfloop query="users">
            <tr>
                <td>
                    #EncodeForHtml(users.username)#
                </td>
                <td>
                    #EncodeForHtml(users.email)#
                </td>
                <td>
                    #linkTo(
                        text="Edit",
                        route="editUser",
                        key=users.id,
                        title="Edit #users.username#"
                    )#
                </td>
                <td>
                    #buttonTo(
                        text="Delete",
                        route="user",
                        key=users.id,
                        method="delete",
                        title="Delete #users.username#"
                    )#
                </td>
            </tr>
        </cfloop>
    </tbody>
</table>

</cfoutput>

Editing Users

We'll now show another cool aspect of form helpers by creating a screen for editing users.

Coding the Edit Form

You probably noticed in the code listed above that we'll have an action for editing a single users record. We used the linkTo() form helper function to add an "Edit" button to the form. This action expects a key as well.

Because in the linkTo() form helper function we specified the parameter key, Wheels adds this parameter into the URL when generating the route.

Wheels will automatically add the provided 'key' from the URL to the params struct in the controllers edit() function.

Given the provided key, we'll have the action load the appropriate user object to pass on to the view:

function edit() {
    user = application.wo.model("user").findByKey(params.key);
}

The view at app/views/users/edit.cfm looks almost exactly the same as the view for creating a user:

<cfoutput>

<h1>Edit User #EncodeForHtml(user.username)#</h1>

#startFormTag(route="user", key=user.key(), method="patch")#
    <div>
        #textField(objectName="user", property="username", label="Username")#
    </div>

    <div>
        #textField(objectName="user", property="email", label="Email")#
    </div>

    <div>
        #passwordField(
            objectName="user",
            property="passwd",
            label="Password"
        )#
    </div>

    <div>#submitTag()#</div>
#endFormTag()#

</cfoutput>

But an interesting thing happens. Because the form fields are bound to the user object via the form helpers' objectName arguments, the form will automatically provide default values based on the object's properties.

With the user model populated, we'll end up seeing code similar to this:

<h1>Edit User Homer Simpson</h1>

<form action="/users/1" method="post">
    <input type="hidden" name="_method" value="patch">

    <div>
        <input type="hidden" name="user&#x5b;id&#x5d;" value="15">
    </div>

    <div>
        <label for="user-username">
            Name
            <input
                id="user-username"
                type="text"
                value="Homer Simpson"
                name="user&#x5b;username&#x5d;">
        </label>
    </div>

    <div>
        <label for="user-email">
            Email
            <input
                id="user-email"
                type="text"
                value="homerj@nuclearpower.com"
                name="user&#x5b;email&#x5d;">
        </label>
    </div>

    <div>
        <label for="user-passwd">
            Password
            <input
                id="user-passwd"
                type="password"
                value="donuts.mmm"
                name="user&#x5b;passwd&#x5d;">
        </label>
    </div>

    <div><input value="Save&#x20;changes" type="submit"></div>
</form>

Pretty cool, huh?

Opportunities for Refactoring

There's a lot of repetition in the new and edit forms. You'd imagine that we could factor out most of this code into a single view file. To keep this tutorial from becoming a book, we'll just continue on knowing that this could be better.

Handing the Edit Form Submission

Now we'll create the update action. This will be similar to the create action, except it will be updating the user object:

function update() {
    user = application.wo.model("user").findByKey(params.key);
    user.update(params.user);

    redirectTo(
        route="editUser",
        key=user.id,
        success="User updated successfully."
    );
}

To update the user, simply call its update() method with the user struct passed from the form via params. It's that simple.

After the update, we'll add a success message using the Flash and send the end user back to the edit form in case they want to make more changes.

Deleting Users

Notice in our listing above that we have a delete action. Here's what it would look like:

function delete() {
    user = application.wo.model("user").findByKey(params.key);
    user.delete();

    redirectTo(
        route="users",
        success="User deleted successfully."
    );
}

We simply load the user using the model's findByKey() method and then call the object's delete() method. That's all there is to it.

Database Says Hello

We've shown you quite a few of the basics in getting a simple user database up and running. We hope that this has whet your appetite to see some of the power packed into the CFWheels framework. There's plenty more.

Be sure to read on to some of the related chapters listed below to learn more about working with CFWheels's ORM.

Starting a local development server

With CommandBox, we don't need to have Lucee or Adobe ColdFusion installed locally. With a simple command, we can make CommandBox go and get the CFML engine we've requested, and quickly create a server running on Undertow. Make sure you're in the root of your website, and then run:

The server will then start on a random port on 127.0.0.1 and will create a server.json file in your webroot. We can add various options to server.json to customize our server. Here's an example:

{
    "name":"myApp",
    "force":true,
    "web":{
        "http":{
            "port":60000
        },
        "rewrites":{
            "enable":true,
            "config":"urlrewrite.xml"
        }
    }
}

In this example, I've set the server name to myApp, meaning I can now start the server from any directory by simply calling start myApp. I've also specified a specific port, 60000, but you can specify any port you want, or just remove that to start on a random port each time. Lastly, I've enabled URL rewriting and pointed the URL rewrite configuration file to urlrewrite.xml, which is included starting from CFWheels 2.x. (If you've used the wheels new command to create your app, this will already be done for you).

Using custom host names

You can also specify hosts other than localhost: there's a useful CommandBox module to do that (Host updater) which will automatically create entries in your hosts file to allow for domains such as myapp.local running on port 80. You can install it via install commandbox-hostupdater when running the box shell with administrator privileges.

Controlling local servers

Obviously, anything you start, you might want to stop. Servers can be stopped either via right/ctrl clicking on the icon in the taskbar, or by the stop command. To stop a server running in the current directory issue the following:

You can also stop a server from anywhere by using its name:

If you want to see what server configurations exist on your system and their current status, simply do server list

myapp (stopped)
 http://127.0.0.1:60000
 Webroot: /Users/cfwheels/Documents/myapp

myAPI (stopped)
 http://127.0.0.1:60010
 Webroot: /Users/cfwheels/Documents/myAPI

megasite (stopped)
 http://127.0.0.1:61280
 CF Engine: lucee 4.5.4+017
 Webroot: /Users/cfwheels/Documents/megasite

awesomesite (stopped)
 http://127.0.0.1:60015
 CF Engine: lucee 4.5.4+017
 Webroot: /Users/cfwheels/Documents/awesomeo

To remove a server configuration from the list, you can use server forget myapp. Note the status of the servers on the list are somewhat unreliable, as it only remembers the last known state of the server: so if you start a server and then turn off your local machine, it may still remember it as running when you turn your local machine back on, which is why we recommend the use of force: true in the server.json file.

Specifying different CF engines

By default, CommandBox will run Lucee (version 6.x at time of writing). You may wish to specify an exact version of Lucee, or use Adobe ColdFusion. We can do this via either setting the appropriate cfengine setting in server.json, or at runtime with the cfengine= argument.

Or via server.json

{
    "name":"myApp",
    "force":true,
    "web":{
        "http":{
            "host":"localhost",
            "port":60000
        },
        "rewrites":{
            "enable":true,
            "config":"urlrewrite.xml"
        }
    },
    "app":{
        "cfengine":"adobe@2018"
    },
}

You can of course run multiple servers, so if you need to test your app on Lucee 5.x, Lucee 6.x and Adobe 2018, you can just start three servers with different cfengine= arguments!

By default the Lucee server that CommandBox starts has all the basic Lucee extensions that you are going to need installed, but if need to minimize the size of the Lucee instance you launch, then you can use Lucee-Light by specifying cfengine=lucee-light in your server.json file. CFWheels can run just fine on lucee-light (which is after all, Lucee, minus all the extensions) but at a minimum, requires the following extensions to be installed as dependencies in your box.json. Please note you may have to add any drivers you need for your database to this list as well.

"dependencies":{
    "lucee-image":"lex:https://ext.lucee.org/lucee.image.extension-1.0.0.35.lex",
    "lucee-zip": "lex:https://ext.lucee.org/compress-extension-1.0.0.2.lex",
    "lucee-esapi": "lex:https://ext.lucee.org/esapi-extension-2.1.0.18.lex"
}

Once added to your box.json file, while the server is running, just do box install, which will install the dependencies, and load them into the running server within 60 seconds.

Alternatively you can download the extensions and add them manually to your server root's deploy folder (i.e \WEB-INF\lucee-server\deploy)

Testing Your Install

Let's make sure we're all on the same page. I'm going to assume that you've followed the Getting Started guide and have CommandBox all setup. If you haven't done that, stop and read that guide get everything setup. It's okay, this web page will wait for you.

Okay, so you have CFWheels installed and can see the CFWheels "Congratulations!" page as shown below. That wasn't that hard now, was it?

Hello World: Your First CFWheels App

Okay, let's get to some example code. We know that you've been dying to get your hands on some code!

To continue with Programming Tutorial Tradition, we'll create the ubiquitous Hello World! application. But to keep things interesting, let's add a little CFWheels magic along the way.

Setting up the Controller

Let's create a controller from scratch to illustrate how easy it is to set up a controller and plug it into the CFWheels framework.

First, create a file called Say.cfc in the app/controllers directory and add the code below to the file.

component extends="Controller"{
}

Congratulations, you just created your first CFWheels controller! What does this controller do, you might ask? Well, to be honest, not much. It has no methods defined, so it doesn't add any new functionality to our application. But because it extends the base Controller component, it inherits quite a bit of powerful functionality and is now tied into our CFWheels application.

So what happens if we try to call our new controller right now? Lets take a look. Open your browser and point your browser to the new controller. Because my local server is installed on port 60000, my URL is http://127.0.0.1:60000/say. You may need to enter a different URL, depending on how your web server is configured. In my case, I'm using CommandBox.

The error says "Could not find the view page for the 'index' action in the 'say' controller." Where did "index" come from? The URL we typed in only specified a controller name but no action. When an action is not specified in the URL, CFWheels assumes that we want the default action. Out of the box, the default action in CFWheels is set to index. So in our example, CFWheels tried to find the index action within the say controller, and it threw an error because it couldn't find its view page.

Setting up an Action

But let's jump ahead. Now that we have the controller created, let's add an action to it called hello. Change your say controller so it looks like the code block below:

component extends="Controller" {
    function hello() {
    }
}

As you can see, we created an empty method named hello.

Now let's call our new action in the browser and see what we get. To call the hello action, we simply add /hello to the end of the previous URL that we used to call our say controller:

http://127.0.0.1:60000/say/hello

Once again, we get a ColdFusion error. Although we have created the controller and added the hello action to it, we haven't created the view.

Setting up the View

By default, when an action is called, CFWheels will look for a view file with the same name as the action. It then hands off the processing to the view to display the user interface. In our case, CFWheels tried to find a view file for our say/hello action and couldn't find one.

Let's remedy the situation and create a view file. View files are simple CFML pages that handle the output of our application. In most cases, views will return HTML code to the browser. By default, the view files will have the same name as our controller actions and will be grouped into a directory under the view directory. This new directory will have the same name as our controller.

Find the views directory inside the app directory, located at the root of your CFWheels installation. There will be a few directories in there already. For now, we need to create a new directory in the views directory called say. This is the same name as the controller that we created above.

Now inside the say directory, create a file called hello.cfm. In the hello.cfm file, add the following line of code:

<h1>Hello World!</h>

Save your hello.cfm file, and let's call our say/hello action once again. You have your first working CFWheels page if your browser looks like Figure 3 below.

You have just created your first functional CFWheels page, albeit it is a very simple one. Pat yourself on the back, go grab a snack, and when you're ready, let's go on and extend the functionality of our Hello World! application a little more.

Adding Dynamic Content to Your View

We will add some simple dynamic content to our hello action and add a second action to the application. We'll then use some CFWheels code to tie the 2 actions together. Let's get get to it!

The Dynamic Content

The first thing we are going to do is to add some dynamic content to our say/hello action. Modify your say controller so it looks like the code block below:

component extends="Controller" {
    function hello() {
        time = Now();
    }
}

All we are doing here is creating a variable called time and setting its value to the current server time using the basic ColdFusion Now() function. When we do this, the variable becomes immediately available to our view code.

Why not just set up this value directly in the view? If you think about it, maybe the logic behind the value of time may eventually change. What if eventually we want to display its value based on the user's time zone? What if later we decide to pull it from a web service instead? Remember, the controller is supposed to coordinate all of the data and business logic, not the view.

Displaying the Dynamic Content

Next, we will modify our say/hello.cfm view file so that it looks like the code block below. When we do this, the value will be displayed in the browser.

<h1>Hello World!</h1>
<p>Current time: <cfoutput>#time#</cfoutput></p>

call your say/hello action again in your browser. Your browser should look like Figure 4 below.

This simple example showed that any dynamic content created in a controller action is available to the corresponding view file. In our application, we created a time variable in the say/hello controller action and display that variable in our say/hello.cfm view file.

Adding a Second Action: Goodbye

Now we will expand the functionality of our application once again by adding a second action to our say controller. If you feel adventurous, go ahead and add a goodbye action to the say controller on your own, then create a goodbye.cfm view file that displays a "Goodbye" message to the user. If you're not feeling that adventurous, we'll quickly go step by step.

First, modify the the say controller file so that it looks like the code block below.

component extends="Controller" {
    function hello() {
        time = Now();
    }

    function goodbye() {
    }
}

Now go to the app/views/say directory and create a goodbye.cfm page.

Add the following code to the goodbye.cfm page and save it.

Goodbye World!

If we did everything right, we should be able to call the new say/goodbye action using the following URL:

http://127.0.0.1:60000/say/goodbye

Your browser should look like Figure 5 below:

Linking to Other Actions

Now let's link our two actions together. We will do this by adding a link to the bottom of each page so that it calls the other page.

Linking Hello to Goodbye

Open the say/hello.cfm view file. We are going to add a line of code to the end of this file so our say/hello.cfm view file looks like the code block below:

<h1>Hello World!</h1>
<p>Current time: <cfoutput>#time#</cfoutput></p>
<p>Time to say <cfoutput>#linkTo(text="goodbye", action="goodbye")#?</cfoutput></p>

The linkTo() function is a built-in CFWheels function. In this case, we are passing 2 named parameters to it. The first parameter, text, is the text that will be displayed in the hyperlink. The second parameter, action, defines the action to point the link to. By using this built-in function, your application's main URL may change, and even controllers and actions may get shifted around, but you won't suffer from the dreaded dead link. CFWheels will always create a valid link for you as long as you configure it correctly when you make infrastructure changes to your application.

Once you have added the additional line of code to the end of the say/hello.cfm view file, save your file and call the say/hello action from your browser. Your browser should look like Figure 6 below.

You can see that CFWheels created a link for us and added an appropriate URL for the say/goodbye action to the link.

Linking Goodbye to Hello

Let's complete our little app and add a corresponding link to the bottom of our say/goodbye.cfm view page.

Open your say/goodbye.cfm view page and modify it so it looks like the code block below.

CFML: app/views/say/goodbye.cfm

<h1>Goodbye World!</h1>
<p>Time to say <cfoutput>#linkTo(text="hello", action="hello")#?</cfoutput></p>

If you now call the say/goodbye action in your browser, your browser should look like Figure 7 below.

Much More to Learn

You now know enough to be dangerous with CFWheels. Look out! But there are many more powerful features to cover. You may have noticed that we haven't even talked about the M in MVC.

No worries. We will get there. And we think you will enjoy it.

Installing CFWheels is so simple that there is barely a need for a chapter devoted to it. But we figured we'd better make one anyway in case anyone is specifically looking for a chapter about installation.

So, here are the simple steps you need to follow to get rolling on CFWheels...

Manual Installation

1. Download CFWheels

You have 2 choices when downloading CFWheels. You can either use the latest official release of CFWheels, or you can take a walk on the wild side and go with the latest committed source code in our Git repository.

The latest official releases can always be found in the section of GitHub, and the Git repository is available at our .

In most cases, we recommend going with the official release because it's well documented and has been through a lot of bug testing. Only if you're in desperate need of a feature that has not been released yet would we advise you to go with the version stored in the Git master branch.

Let's assume you have downloaded the latest official release. (Really, you should go with this option.) You now have a .zip file saved somewhere on your computer. On to the next step...

2. Setup the Website

Getting an empty website running with CFWheels installed is an easy process if you already know your way around IIS or Apache. Basically, you need to create a new website in your web server of choice and unzip the contents of the file into the root of it.

In case you're not sure, here are the instructions for setting up an empty CFWheels site that can be accessed when typing localhost in your browser. The instructions refer to a system running Windows Server 2003 and IIS, but you should be able to follow along and apply the instructions with minor modifications to your system. (See for a list of tested systems).

• Create a new folder under your web root (usually C:\Inetpub\wwwroot) named wheels_site and unzip the CFWheels .zip file into the root of it.

• Create a new website using IIS called CFWheels Site with localhost as the host header name and C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\mysite as the path to your home directory.

If you want to run a CFWheels-powered application from a subfolder in an existing website, this is entirely possible, but you may need to get a little creative with your URL rewrite rules if you want to get pretty URLs--it will only work out of the box on recent versions of Apache. (Read more about this in the chapter.)

3. Setup the Database (Optional)

Create a new database in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or H2 and add a new data source for it in the ColdFusion/Lucee Administrator, just as you'd normally do. Now open up app/config/settings.cfm and call set(dataSourceName="") with the name you chose for the data source.

4. Test It

When you've followed the steps above, you can test your installation by typing http://localhost/ (or whatever you set as the host header name) in your web browser. You should get a page saying "Welcome to CFWheels!"

That's it. You're done. This is where the fun begins!

CFWheels 2.x

Create a basic CRUD interface in CFWheels 2.x

Create a basic JSON API in CFWheels 2.x

Routing in CFWheels 2.x - Part 1

Routing in CFWheels 2.x - Part 2

Introduction to Unit Testing in CFWheels 2.x

Unit Testing Controllers in CFWheels 2.x

CFWheels 1.x

CRUD series

Learn about basic create operations when building standard CRUD functionality in CFWheels

Learn about basic read operations when building standard CRUD functionality in CFWheels

Chris Peters demonstrates updating data in a simple CRUD CFWheels application

Learn how simple it is to delete records in a basic CRUD application using CFWheels

"Building a Social Network"

Chris Peters adds data validation to the user registration form

Other

CFWheels was designed to be as lightweight as possible, so this keeps your options fairly open for developing AJAX features into your application.

While there are several flavors of JavaScript libraries out there with AJAX support, we will be using the in this tutorial. Let's assume that you are fairly familiar with the basics of jQuery and know how to set it up.

For this tutorial, let's create the simplest example of all: a link that will render a message back to the user without refreshing the page.

A Simple Example

In this example, we'll wire up some simple JavaScript code that calls a CFWheels action asynchronously. All of this will be done with basic jQuery code and built-in CFWheels functionality.

First, let's make sure we've got an appropriate route setup. It might be you're still using the default wildcard() route which will create some default GET routes for the controller/action pattern, but we'll add a new route here just for practice. We are going to create a route named sayHello and direct it to the hello action of the say controller. There are two ways you could write this code a long hand method specifying the controller and action separately as well as a short hand method that combines the two into a single parameter.

The longhand way would look like:

The shorthand method would look like:

You can decide which method you prefer. Both sets of code above are equivalent.

Then, let's create a link to a controller's action in a view file, like so:

That piece of code by itself will work just like you expect it to. When you click the link, you will load the hello action inside the say controller.

With that code, we are listening to the click event of the hyperlink, which will make an asynchronous request to the hello action in the say controller. Additionally, the JavaScript call is passing a URL parameter called format set to json.

Note that the success block inserts keys from the response into the empty h1 and p blocks in the calling view. (You may have been wondering about those when you saw the first example. Mystery solved.)

Lastly, notice the lines where we're setting greeting["message"] and greeting["time"]. Due to the case-insensitive nature of ColdFusion, we recommend setting variables to be consumed by JavaScript using bracket notation like that. If you do not use that notation (i.e., greetings.message and greetings.time instead), your JavaScript will need to reference those keys from the JSON as MESSAGE and TIME (all caps). Unless you like turning caps lock on and off, you can see how that would get annoying after some time.

Assuming you already included jQuery in your application and you followed the code examples above, you now have a simple AJAX-powered web application built on Wheels. After clicking that Alert me! link, your say controller will respond back to you the serialized message via AJAX. jQuery will parse the JSON object and populate the h1 and pwith the appropriate data.

AJAX in CFWheels Explained

That is it! Hopefully now you have a clearer picture on how to create AJAX-based features for your web applications.

These are the commands in the wheels generate namespace. These commands are called by some of the top level commands but you can use them directly to speed up your development process.

wheels generate

The wheels generate command is what CommandBox calls a namespace and contains many sub commands beneath it. It's main purpose is to isolate those sub commands so there is no name collisions. It also has an alias of wheels g which allows you to shorten the commands you have to type. However, we have opted to show all the commands with their full names in the list below.

wheels generate app-wizard

Creates a new CFWheels application using our wizard to gather all the necessary information. This is the recommended route to start a new application.

This command will ask for:

• An Application Name (a new directory will be created with this name)

• Template to use

• A reload Password

• A datasource name

• What local cfengine you want to run

• If using Lucee, do you want to setup a local h2 dev database

• Do you want to initialize the app as a ForgeBox module

All these three commands are equivalent and will call the same wizard. The wizard in turn gathers all the required data and passes it all off to the wheels generate app command to do all the heavy lifting.

Let's take a look at the wizard pages after issuing the wheels new command:

You can accept the name offered or change it to whatever name you like. We try to clean up the name and take out special characters and spaces if we need to.

You can select a template to use for your app.

The datasource is something you'll have to take care of unless you opt to use the H2 Embedded database in a Lucee server. Here you can define the datasource name if you would like to use something different than the application name.

In this step you can choose what CF Engine and version to launch. Lucee has an embedded SQL compliant database server called H2. So if you use one of the Lucee options you can specify to use the H2 database as well. Notice the last item allows you to specify the module slug or URI to a CF Engine not on the list.

On this step you are asked if you'd like to use the H2 Database, in which case we can set everything up for you, or if you would prefer to use another database engine and will take care of setting up the database yourself.

On this last step, you are asked if you want us to include a box.json file so you can eventually submit this to ForgeBox.io for sharing with the world.

This is the confirmation screen that shows all the choices you've made and gives you one last chance to bail out. If you choose to continue, the choices you've made will be sent over to the wheels g app command to do the actual app creation.

If you opted to continue you'll see a bunch of things scroll across your screen as the various items are downloaded and configured. Eventually you will see this status screen letting you know that everything was installed properly.

wheels generate app

Create a blank CFWheels app from one of our app templates or a template using a valid Endpoint ID which can come from ForgeBox, HTTP/S, git, github, etc.

By default an app named MyCFWheelsApp will be created in a sub directory called MyCFWheelsApp.

The most basic call...

This can be shortened to...

Here are the basic templates that are available for you that come from ForgeBox

• CFWheels Base Template - Stable (default)

• CFWheels Base Template - Bleeding Edge

• CFWheels Template - HelloWorld

• CFWheels Template - HelloDynamic

• CFWheels Template - HelloPages

• CFWheels Example App

• CFWheels - TodoMVC - HTMX - Demo App

The template parameter can also be any valid Endpoint ID, which includes a Git repo or HTTP URL pointing to a package. So you can use this to publish your own templates to use to start new projects.

wheels generate route

Adds a default resources Route to the routes table. All the normal CRUD routes are automatically added.

wheels generate controller

I generate a controller in the app/controllers/ directory. You can either pass in a list of actions to stub out or the standard CRUD methods will be generated.

Create a user controller with full CRUD methods

Create a user object with just "index" and "customaction" methods

wheels generate model

This command generates a model in the app/models/ folder and creates the associated DB Table using migrations.

Create "users" table and "User.cfc" in models:

Create just "User.cfc" in models:

wheels generate property

This command generates a dbmigration file to add a property to an object and scaffold into _form.cfm and show.cfm if they exist (i.e, wheels generate property table columnName columnType).

Create the a string/textField property called firstname on the User model:

Create a boolean/Checkbox property called isActive on the User model with a default of 0:

Create a boolean/Checkbox property called hasActivated on the User model with a default of 1 (i.e, true):

Create a datetime/datetimepicker property called lastloggedin on the User model:

All columnType options: biginteger,binary,boolean,date,datetime,decimal,float,integer,string,limit,text,time,timestamp,uuid

wheels generate view

This command generates a view file in the app/views/ directory when specifying the object name and the action. If a directory for the object does not exist a subdirectory will be created in the app/views/ directory and the action NAME.cfm file place into it.

Create a default file called show.cfm without a template

Create a default file called show.cfm using the default CRUD template

The "crud/show" parameter of this command is referring to an existing template to be used to generate the "user/show" view. The prefix "crud" points to a templates directory in the app that holds a "crud" directory in which templates like "show" are placed. In this way the "crud/show" parameter fetches the show.txt template in the "templates/crud" directory and uses that for generating the "user/show" view.

wheels generate test

This command generates a test stub in /tests/Testbox/specs/TYPE/NAME.cfc.

The command line tools extends the functionality of with some commands specifically designed for CFWheels development.

brings a whole host of command line capabilities to the CFML developer. It allows you to write scripts that can be executed at the command line written entirely in CFML. It allows you to start a CFML server from any directory on your machine and wire up the code in that directory as the web root of the server. What's more is, those servers can be either Lucee servers or Adobe ColdFusion servers. You can even specify what version of each server to launch. Lastly, CommandBox is a package manager for CFML. That means you can take some CFML code and package it up into a module, host it on ForgeBox.io, and make it available to other CFML developers. In fact we make extensive use of these capabilities to distribute CFWheels plugins and templates. More on that later.

One module that we have created is a module that extends CommandBox itself with commands and features specific to the CFWheels framework. The CFWheels CLI module for CommandBox is modeled after the Ruby on Rails CLI module and gives similar capabilities to the CFWheels developer.

Install CommandBox

The first step is to get downloaded and running. CommandBox is available for Windows, Mac & Linux, and can be installed manually or using one of the respective package managers for each OS. You can use on Windows, on MacOS, or Yum/Apt on Linux depending on your flavor of Linux. Please follow the instructions on how to install CommandBox on your particular operating system. At the end of the installation process you want to make sure the box command is part of your system path so you can call the command from any directory on your system.

Once installed, you can either double-click on the box executable which opens the CommandBox shell window, or run box from a CMD window in Windows, Terminal window in MacOS, or shell prompt on a Linux server. Sometimes you only want to call a single CommandBox command and don't need to launch a whole CommandBox shell window to do that, for these instances you can call the CommandBox command directly from your default system terminal window by prefixing the command with the box prefix.

So to run the CommandBox version command you could run box version from the shell or you could launch the CommandBox shell and run version inside it.

This is a good concept to grasp, cause depending on your workflow, you may find it easier to do one versus the other. Most of the commands you will see in these CLI guides will assume that you are entering the command in the actual CommandBox shell so the box prefix is left off.

Install the cfwheels-cli CommandBox Module

Okay, now that we have CommandBox installed, let's add the CFWheels CLI module.

Installing this module will add a number of commands to your default CommandBox installation. All of these commands are prefixed by the wheels name space. There are commands to create a brand new CFWheels application or scaffold out sections of your application. We'll see some of these commands in action momentarily.

These tools allow you to adopt a more modern workflow and allow you to create and manipulate many CFWheels objects from the command line. By making these tools available in the command line, not only will you be able to speed up your development but you can also utilize these commands in Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) work flows.

CFWheels follows Semantic Versioning () so large version changes (e.g, 1.x.x -> 2.x.x) will most likely contain breaking changes which will require evaluation of your codebase. Minor version changes (e.g, 1.3.x->1.4.x) will often contain new functionality, but in a backwards-compatible manner, and maintenance releases (e.g 1.4.4 -> 1.4.5) will just be trying to fix bugs.

Generally speaking, upgrading CFWheels is as easy as replacing the wheels folder, especially for those small maintenance releases: however, there are usually exceptions in minor point releases (i.e, 1.1 to 1.3 required replacing other files outside the wheels folder). The notes below detail those changes.

Upgrading to 3.0.0

Compatibility Changes

Adobe Coldfusion 2016 and below are no longer compatible with CFWheels going forward. Consequently, these versions have been removed from the Wheels Internal Test Suites.

Code changes

• Prefix global and controller functions with application.wo. For example, change the model("") function in your controllers to application.wo.model("").

• Migrate your tests from the tests directory which are written with rocketUnit and rewrite them into in the tests/Testbox directory. Starting with CFWheels 3.x, will replace RocketUnit as the default testing framework.

• Starting with CFWheels 3.x, will be used as the default dependency injector.

• After installing CFWheels 3.x, you'll have to run box install to intall testbox and wirebox in your application as they are not shipped with CFWheels but are rather listed in box.json file as dependencies to be installed.

• Added Mappings for the app, vendor, wheels, wirebox, testbox and tests directories.

• root.cfm and rewrite.cfm have been removed. All the requests are now being redirected only through public/index.cfm.

• A .env file has been added in the root of the application which adds the H2 database extension for lucee and sets the cfadmin password to commandbox for both and .

Changes to the wheels folder

• Replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 3.0.0 download.

• Move the wheels folder inside the vendor folder.

Changes outside the wheels folder

• Moved the config, controllers, events, global, lib, migrator, models, plugins, snippets and views directories inside the app directory.

• Moved the files, images, javascripts, miscellaneous, stylesheets directories and Application.cfc, index.cfm and urlrewrite.xml files into the public folder.

Upgrading to 2.3.x

Replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 2.3.0 download.

Upgrading to 2.2.x

Replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 2.2.0 download.

Upgrading to 2.1.x

Replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 2.1.0 download.

Code changes

• Rename any instances of findLast() to findLastOne()

Changes outside the wheels folder

• Create /events/onabort.cfm to support the onAbort method

Upgrading to 2.0.x

As always, the first step is to replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 2.0 download.

Other major changes required to upgrade your application are listed in the following sections.

Supported CFML Engines

CFWheels 2.0 requires one of these CFML engines:

• Lucee 4.5.5.006 + / 5.2.1.9+

• Adobe ColdFusion 10.0.23 / 11.0.12+ / 2016.0.4+

We've updated our minimum requirements to match officially supported versions from the vendors. (For example, Adobe discontinued support for ColdFusion 10 in May 2017, which causes it to be exposed to security exploits in the future. We've included it in 2.0 but it may be discontinued in a future version)

Changes outside the wheels folder

• The events/functions.cfm file has been moved to global/functions.cfm.

• The models/Model.cfc file should extend wheels.Model instead of Wheels (models/Wheels.cfc can be deleted).

• The controllers/Controller.cfc file should extend wheels.Controller instead of Wheels(controllers/Wheels.cfc can be deleted).

• The init function of controllers and models must be renamed to config.

• The global setting modelRequireInit has been renamed to modelRequireConfig.

• The global setting cacheControllerInitialization has been renamed to cacheControllerConfig.

• The global setting cacheModelInitialization has been renamed to cacheModelConfig.

• The global setting clearServerCache has been renamed to clearTemplateCache.

• The updateProperties() method has been removed, use update() instead.

• The renderPage function has been renamed to renderView

• includePartial() now requires the partial and query arguments to be set (if using a query)

Routing

By default, this is limited to GET requests for security reasons.

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Protection

It is strongly recommended that you enable CFWheels 2.0's built-in CSRF protection.

For many applications, you need to follow these steps:

4. Update your route definitions to enforce HTTP verbs on actions that manipulate data (get, post, patch, delete, etc.)

5. Make sure that forms within the application are POSTing data to the actions that require post, patch, and delete verbs.

Database Migrations

If you have previously been using the dbmigrate plugin, you can now use the inbuilt version within the CFWheels 2 core.

Database Migration files in /db/migrate/ should now be moved to /migrator/migrations and extend wheels.migrator.Migration, not plugins.dbmigrate.Migration which can be changed with a simple find and replace. Note: Oracle is not currently supported for Migrator.

Upgrading to 1.4.x

1. Replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 1.4 download.

2. Replace URL rewriting rule files – i.e, .htaccess, web.config, IsapiRewrite.ini

In addition, if you're upgrading from an earlier version of CFWheels, we recommend reviewing the instructions from earlier reference guides below.

Upgrading to 1.3.x

If you are upgrading from CFWheels 1.1.0 or newer, follow these steps:

1. Replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 1.3 download.

2. Replace the root root.cfm file with the new one from the 1.3 download.

3. Remove the <cfheader> calls from the following files:

   • events/onerror.cfm

   • events/onmaintenance.cfm

   • events/onmissingtemplate.cfm

In addition, if you're upgrading from an earlier version of CFWheels, we recommend reviewing the instructions from earlier reference guides below.

Note: To accompany the newest 1.1.x releases, we've highlighted the changes that are affected by each release in this cycle.

Upgrading to 1.1.x

If you are upgrading from Wheels 1.0 or newer, the easiest way to upgrade is to replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 1.1 download. If you are upgrading from an earlier version, we recommend reviewing the steps outlined in Upgrading to Wheels 1.0.

Note: To accompany the newest 1.1.x releases, we've highlighted the changes that are affected by each release in this cycle.

Plugin Compatibility

Be sure to review your plugins and their compatibility with your newly-updated version of Wheels. Some plugins may stop working, throw errors, or cause unexpected behavior in your application.

Supported System Changes

• 1.1: The minimum Adobe ColdFusion version required is now 8.0.1.

• 1.1: The minimum Railo version required is now 3.1.2.020.

• 1.1: The H2 database engine is now supported.

File System Changes

• 1.1: The .htaccess file has been changed. Be sure to copy over the new one from the new version 1.1 download and copy any addition changes that you may have also made to the original version.

Database Structure Changes

• 1.1: By default, Wheels 1.1 will wrap database queries in transactions. This requires that your database engine supports transactions. For MySQL in particular, you can convert your MyISAM tables to InnoDB to be compatible with this new functionality. Otherwise, to turn off automatic transactions, place a call to set(transactionMode="none").

• 1.1: Binary data types are now supported.

CFML Code Changes

Model Code

• 1.1: Validations will be applied to some model properties automatically. This may cause unintended behavior with your validations. To turn this setting off, call set(automaticValidations=false) in config/settings.cfm.

• 1.1: The class argument in hasOne(), hasMany(), and belongsTo() has been deprecated. Use the modelName argument instead.

• 1.1: afterFind() callbacks no longer require special logic to handle the setting of properties in objects and queries. (The "query way" works for both cases now.) Because arguments will always be passed in to the method, you can't rely on StructIsEmpty() to determine if you're dealing with an object or not. In the rare cases that you need to know, you can now call isInstance() or isClass() instead.

• 1.1: On create, a model will now set the updatedAt auto-timestamp to the same value as the createdAt timestamp. To override this behavior, call set(setUpdatedAtOnCreate=false) in config/settings.cfm.

View Code

• 1.1: Object form helpers (e.g. textField() and radioButton()) now automatically display a label based on the property name. If you left the label argument blank while using an earlier version of Wheels, some labels may start appearing automatically, leaving you with unintended results. To stop a label from appearing, use label=false instead.

• 1.1: The contentForLayout() helper to be used in your layout files has been deprecated. Use the includeContent() helper instead.

• 1.1: In production mode, query strings will automatically be added to the end of all asset URLs (which includes JavaScript includes, stylesheet links, and images). To turn off this setting, call set(assetQueryString=false) in config/settings.cfm.

• 1.1: stylesheetLinkTag() and javaScriptIncludeTag() now accept external URLs for the source/sources argument. If you manually typed out these tags in previous releases, you can now use these helpers instead.

• 1.1: flashMessages(), errorMessageOn(), and errorMessagesFor() now create camelCased class attributes instead (for example error-messages is now errorMessages). The same goes for the class attribute on the tag that wraps form elements with errors: it is now fieldWithErrors.

Controller Code

• 1.1.1: The if argument in all validation functions is now deprecated. Use the condition argument instead.

Upgrading to 1.0.x

Our listing of steps to take while upgrading your Wheels application from earlier versions to 1.0.x.

Upgrading from an earlier version of 1.x? Then the upgrade path is simple. All you need to do is replace the wheels folder with the new wheels folder from the download.

The easiest way to upgrade is to setup an empty website, deploy a fresh copy of Wheels 1.0, and then transfer your application code to it. When transferring, please make note of the following changes and make the appropriate changes to your code.

Note: To accompany the newest 1.0 release, we've highlighted the changes that are affected by that release.

Supported System Changes

• 1.0: URL rewriting with IIS 7 is now supported.

• 1.0: URL rewriting in a sub folder on Apache is now supported.

• ColdFusion 9 is now supported.

• Oracle 10g or later is now supported.

• PostgreSQL is now supported.

• Railo 3.1 is now supported.

File System Changes

• 1.0: There is now an app.cfm file in the config folder. Use it to set variables that you'd normally set in Application.cfc (i.e., this.name, this.sessionManagement, this.customTagPaths, etc.)

• 1.0: There is now a web.config file in the root.

• 1.0: There is now a Wheels.cfc file in the models folder.

• 1.0: The Wheels.cfc file in the controllers folder has been updated.

• 1.0: The IsapiRewrite4.ini and .htaccess files in the root have both been updated.

• The controller folder has been changed to controllers.

• The model folder has been changed to models.

• The view folder has been changed to views.

• Rename all of your CFCs in models and controllers to UpperCamelCase. So controller.cfc will become Controller.cfc, adminUser.cfc will become AdminUser.cfc, and so on.

• All images must now be stored in the images folder, files in the files folder, JavaScript files in the javascripts folder, and CSS files in the stylesheets folder off of the root.

Database Structure Changes

• deletedOn, updatedOn, and createdOn are no longer available as auto-generated fields. Please change the names to deletedAt, updatedAt, and createdAt instead to get similar functionality, and make sure that they are of type datetime, timestamp, or equivalent.

CFML Code Changes

Config Code

• 1.0: The action of the default route (home) has changed to wheels. The way configuration settings are done has changed quite a bit. To change a Wheels application setting, use the new set() function with the name of the Wheels property to change. (For example, <cfset set(dataSourceName="mydatasource")>.) To see a list of available Wheels settings, refer to the Configuration and Defaults chapter. Model Code

• 1.0: The extends attribute in models/Model.cfc should now be Wheels.

• findById() is now called findByKey(). Additionally, its id argument is now named key instead. For composite keys, this argument will accept a comma-delimited list.

• When using a model's findByKey() or findOne() functions, the found property is no longer available. Instead, the functions return false if the record was not found.

• A model's errorsOn() function now always returns an array, even if there are no errors on the field. When there are errors for the field, the array elements will contain a struct with name, fieldName, and message elements.

• The way callbacks are created has changed. There is now a method for each callback event ( beforeValidation(), beforeValidationOnCreate(), etc.) that should be called from your model's init() method. These methods take a single argument: the method within your model that should be invoked during the callback event. See the chapter on Object Callbacks for an example.

View Code

• 1.0: The contents of the views/wheels folder have been changed.

• The wrapLabel argument in form helpers is now replaced with labelPlacement. Valid values for labelPlacement are before, after, and around.

• The first argument for includePartial() has changed from name to partial. If you're referring to it through a named argument, you'll need to replace all instances with partial.

• The variable that keeps a counter of the current record when using includePartial() with a query has been renamed from currentRow to current.

• There is now an included wheels view folder in views. Be sure to copy that into your existing Wheels application if you're upgrading.

• The location of the default layout has changed. It is now stored at /views/layout.cfm. Now controller-specific layouts are stored in their respective view folder as layout.cfm. For example, a custom layout for www.domain.com/about would be stored at /views/about/layout.cfm.

• In linkTo(), the id argument is now called key. It now accepts a comma-delimited list in the case of composite keys.

• The linkTo() function also accepts an object for the key argument, in which case it will automatically extract the keys from it for use in the hyperlink.

• The linkTo() function can be used only for controller-, action-, and route-driven links now. * The url argument has been removed, so now all static links should be coded using a standard "a" tag.

Controller Code

URL/Routing

• The default route for Wheels has changed from [controller]/[action]/[id] to [controller]/[action]/[key]. This is to support composite keys. The params.id value will now only be available as params.key.

• You can now pass along composite keys in the URL. Delimit multiple keys with a comma. (If you want to use this feature, then you can't have a comma in the key value itself).

By far the quickest way to get started with CFWheels is via . CommandBox brings a whole host of command line capabilities to the CFML developer. It allows you to write scripts that can be executed at the command line written entirely in CFML. It allows you to start a CFML server from any directory on your machine and wire up the code in that directory as the web root of the server. What's more is, those servers can be either Lucee servers or Adobe ColdFusion servers. You can even specify what version of each server to launch. Lastly, CommandBox is a package manager for CFML. That means you can take some CFML code and package it up into a module, host it on ForgeBox.io, and make it available to other CFML developers. In fact we make extensive use of these capabilities to distribute CFWheels plugins and templates. More on that later.

One module that we have created is a module that extends CommandBox itself with commands and features specific to the CFWheels framework. The CFWheels CLI module for CommandBox is modeled after the Ruby on Rails CLI module and gives similar capabilities to the CFWheels developer.

Install CommandBox

The first step is to get downloaded and running. CommandBox is available for Windows, Mac & Linux, and can be installed manually or using one of the respective package managers for each OS. You can use on Windows, on MacOS, or Yum/Apt on Linux depending on your flavor of Linux. Please follow the instructions on how to install CommandBox on your particular operating system. At the end of the installation process you want to make sure the box command is part of your system path so you can call the command from any directory on your system.

Once installed, you can either double-click on the box executable which opens the CommandBox shell window, or run box from a CMD window in Windows, Terminal window in MacOS, or shell prompt on a Linux server. Sometimes you only want to call a single CommandBox command and don't need to launch a whole CommandBox shell window to do that, for these instances you can call the CommandBox command directly from your default system terminal window by prefixing the command with the box prefix.

So to run the CommandBox version command you could run box version from the shell or you could launch the CommandBox shell and run version inside it.

This is a good concept to grasp, cause depending on your workflow, you may find it easier to do one versus the other. Most of the commands you will see in these CLI guides will assume that you are entering the command in the actual CommandBox shell so the box prefix is left off.

Install the cfwheels-cli CommandBox Module

Okay, now that we have CommandBox installed, let's add the CFWheels CLI module.

Installing this module will add a number of commands to your default CommandBox installation. All of these commands are prefixed by the wheels name space. There are commands to create a brand new CFWheels application or scaffold out sections of your application. We'll see some of these commands in action momentarily.

Start a new Application

Now that we have CommandBox installed and extended it with the CFWheels CLI module, let's start our first CFWheels app from the command line. We'll look at the simplest method for creating a CFWheels app and starting our development server.

A few minutes after submitting the above commands a new browser window should open up and display the default CFWheels congratulations screen.

So what just happened? Since we only passed the application name myApp to the wheels generate app command, it used default values for most of its parameters and downloaded our Base template (cfwheels-base-template) from ForgeBox.io, then downloaded the framework core files (cfwheels) from ForgeBox.io and placed it in the wheels directory, then configured the application name and reload password, and started a Lucee server on a random port.

This getting started guide has taken you from the very beginning and gotten you to the point where you can go into any empty directory on your local development machine and start a CFWheels project by issuing a couple of CLI commands. In later guides we'll explore these options further and see what else the CLI can do for us.

These are the top level commands in the wheels namespace.

wheels info

This command is the most basic of the commands and other than printing some pretty ASCII art it also displays the Current Working Directory, the CommandBox Module Root which can be handy when trying to diagnose version discrepancies, and lastly the CFWheels version currently installed. The version is determined from a variety of sources. First and foremost, if there is a box.json file in the vendor/wheels/ directory the version is extracted from that box.json. Alternatively, if there is no box.json file in the wheels/ directory, we look in vendor/wheels/events/onapplicationstart.cfm and extract a version number from that file. That is the version number that is displayed on the default congratulations screen by the way. If both of these fail to get us a version number we can use, we ask you to let us know what version of wheels you are using and give you the option of generating a box.json file. This is handy for bringing old legacy installations under CLI control.

wheels init

This will attempt to bootstrap an EXISTING wheels app to work with the CLI.

We'll assume the database/datasource exists and the other config options like reloadpassword is all set up. If there's no box.json, create it, and ask for the version number if we can't determine it. If there's no server.json, create it, and ask for cfengine preferences. We'll ignore other templating objects for now, as this will probably be in place too.

wheels reload

This command will reload your CFWheels application. In order for this command to work, your local server needs to be started and running. This command basically issues a request to the running CFWheels application to reload as if you were doing it from your browsers address bar. You will be prompted for your reload password that will be passed to the reload endpoint.

wheels test

This command will call the Test Runner in a running server and return the results. The command can be run from within the directory of the running server or you can specify the server name to run against. Additionally you can specify the test suite to run, possible choices include the running application's test suite (app), the core framework test suite (core), or a particular plugin's test suite by passing in the plugin name.

wheels scaffold

This command will completely scaffold a new object. Typically you would run this command to stub out all the CRUD related files and then follow it up with a series of wheels g property commands to add the individual fields to the object. This command will:

• Create a model file

• A Default CRUD Controller complete with create/edit/update/delete code

• View files for all those actions

• Associated test stubs

• DB migration file

This command can be run without the server running except the database migration portion because that requires a running database. So if your server is already up and running you can run this command completely including the database migration portion. Afterwards make sure to run wheels reload to reload your application since we just made model changes. If the server isn't running, you can run this command and stub out all the files, then start your server with server start and finally migrate the database with wheels db latest.

wheels destroy

This command will destroy a given object. This is highly destructive, given the name, so proceed with caution. If you created an object using the wheels scaffold [objectName] command, this command is the inverse of that command and will remove all elements created by that command.

This command will destroy the following elements:

• the models definition file

• the controllers definition file

• the view sub folder and all it's contents

• the model test file

• the controller test file

• the views test file

• resource route configuration

We all love the "Convention over Configuration" motto of CFWheels, but what about those two cases that pop into everyone's head? What if I want to develop in my own way? Or, What about an existing application that I need to port into CFWheels? Gladly, that's what configuration and defaults are there for. Let's take a look at exactly how this is performed.

Where Configurations Happen

You will find configuration files in the app/config folder of your CFWheels application. In general, most of your settings will go in app/config/settings.cfm.

You can also set values based on what environment you have set. For example, you can have different values for your settings depending on whether you're in development mode or production mode. See the chapter on Switching Environments for more details.

How to Set Configurations

To change a CFWheels application default, you generally use the set() function. With it, you can perform all sorts of tweaks to the framework's default behaviors.

How to Access Configuration Values

Use the get() function to access the value of a CFWheels application setting. Just pass it the name of the setting.

if (get("environment") == "production") {
    // Do something for production environment
}

Setting CFML Application Configurations

In CFML's standard Application.cfc, you can normally set values for your application's properties in the thisscope. CFWheels still provides these options to you in the file at app/config/app.cfm.

Here is an example of what can go in app/config/app.cfm:

this.name = "TheNextSiteToBeatTwitter";
this.sessionManagement = false;

this.customTagPaths = ListAppend(
  this.customTagPaths,
  ExpandPath("../customtags")
);

Types of Configurations Available

There are several types of configurations that you can perform in CFWheels to override all those default behaviors. In CFWheels, you can find all these configuration options:

• Environment settings

• URL rewriting settings

• Data source settings

• Function settings

• Debugging and error settings

• Caching settings

• ORM settings

• Plugin settings

• Media settings

• Routing settings

• View helper settings

• CSRF protection settings

• Miscellaneous Settings

• Migrator settings

Let's take a closer look at each of these options.

Environment Settings

Not only are the environments useful for separating your production settings from your "under development" settings, but they are also opportunities for you to override settings that will only take effect in a specified environment.

The setting for the current environment can be found in app/config/environment.cfm and should look something like this:

set(environment="development");

Full Listing of Environment Settings

URL Rewriting Settings

Sometimes it is useful for our applications to "force" URL rewriting. By default, CFWheels will try to determinate what type of URL rewriting to perform and set it up for you. But you can force in or out this setting by using the example below:

set(urlRewriting="Off");

The code above will tell CFWheels to skip its automatic detection of the URL Rewriting capabilities and just set it as "Off".

You can also set it to "Partial" if you believe that your web server is capable of rewriting the URL as folders after index.cfm.

For more information, read the chapter about URL Rewriting.

Data Source Settings

Probably the most important configuration of them all. What is an application without a database to store all of its precious data?

The data source configuration is what tells CFWheels which database to use for all of its models. (This can be overridden on a per-model basis, but that will be covered later.) To set this up in CFWheels, it's just as easy as the previous example:

set(dataSourceName="yourDataSourceName");
set(dataSourceUserName="yourDataSourceUsername");
set(dataSourcePassword="yourDataSourcePassword");

Function Settings

OK, here it's where the fun begins! CFWheels includes a lot of functions to make your life as a CFML developer easier. A lot of those functions have sensible default argument values to minimize the amount of code that you need to write. And yes, you guessed it, CFWheels lets you override those default argument values application-wide.

Let's look at a little of example:

set(functionName="findAll", perPage=20);

That little line of code will make all calls to the findAll() method in CFWheels return a maximum number of 20 record per page (if pagination is enabled for that findAll() call). How great is that? You don't need to set the perPage value for every single call to findAll() if you have a different requirement than the CFWheels default of 10 records.

Debugging and Error Settings

You'll generally want to configure how CFWheels handles errors and debugging information based on your environment. For example, you probably won't want to expose CFML errors in your production environment, whereas you would want to see those errors in your development environment.

For example, let's say that we want to enable debugging information in our "development" environment temporarily:

// /app/config/development/settings.cfm
set(showDebugInformation=false);

Full Listing of Debugging and Error Settings

For more information, refer to the chapter about Switching Environments.

Caching Settings

CFWheels does a pretty good job at caching the framework and its output to speed up your application. But if personalization is key in your application, finer control over caching settings will become more important.

Let's say your application generates dynamic routes and you need it to check the routes on each request. This task will be as simple as this line of code:

set(cacheRoutes=false);

Full Listing of Caching Settings

For more information, refer to the chapter on Caching.

ORM Settings

The CFWheels ORM provides many sensible conventions and defaults, but sometimes your data structure requires different column naming or behavior than what CFWheels expects out of the box. Use these settings to change those naming conventions or behaviors across your entire application.

For example, if we wanted to prefix all of the database table names in our application with blog_ but didn't want to include that at the beginning of model names, we would do this:

set(tableNamePrefix="blog_");

Now your post model will map to the blog_posts table, comment model will map to the blog_comments table, etc.

Full Listing of ORM Settings

Plugin Settings

There are several settings that make plugin development more convenient. We recommend only changing these settings in development mode so there aren't any deployment issues in production, testing, and maintenancemodes. (At that point, your plugin should be properly packaged in a zip file.)

If you want to keep what's stored in a plugin's zip file from overwriting changes that you made in its expanded folder, set this in app/config/development/settings.cfm:

set(overwritePlugins=false);

See the chapter on Installing and Using Plugins for more information.

Media Settings

Configure how CFWheels handles linking to assets through view helpers like imageTag(), styleSheetLinkTag(), and javaScriptIncludeTag().

See the chapter about Date, Media, and Text Helpers for more information.

Full Listing of Asset Settings

Routing Settings

CFWheels includes a powerful routing system. Parts of it are configurable with the following settings.

See the chapters about Using Routes and Obfuscating URLs for more information about how this all works together.

Full Listing of Miscellaneous Settings

View Helper Settings

CFWheels has a multitude of view helpers for building links, forms, form elements, and more. Use these settings to configure global defaults for their behavior.

CSRF Protection Settings

CFWheels includes built-in Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection for form posts. Part of the CSRF protection involves storing an authenticity token in the session (default) or within an encrypted cookie. Most of the settings below are for when you've chosen to store the authenticity token within a cookie instead of the server's session store.

CORS Protection Settings

CFWheels includes built-in Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) which allows you to configure which cross-origin requests and methods are allowed. By default, this feature is turned off which will deny cross origin requests at the browser level.

In this first version, the user can enable this feature, which will allow requests from all origins and all methods.

Miscellaneous Settings

Migrator Configuration Settings

These are the commands in the wheels dbmigrate namespace. They allow you to manipulate the database structure and script the changes. This makes is easy to share your changes with coworkers, check them into source control, or apply them automatically when you deploy your code to production.

wheels dbmigrate

This is another namespace with sub commands within it. It also has an alias of wheels db which allows you to shorten the command you need to type.

wheels dbmigrate info

This command doesn't take any inputs but simply tries to communicate with the running server and gather information about your migrations and displays them in a table.

wheels dbmigrate info

❯ wheels db info
Sending: http://127.0.0.1:59144/?controller=wheels&action=wheels&view=cli&command=info
Call to bridge was successful.
+-----------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------+
| Datasource:                   wheels.fw | Total Migrations:                     3 |
| Database Type:                       H2 | Available Migrations:                 2 |
|                                         | Current Version:         20220619110404 |
|                                         | Latest Version:          20220619110706 |
+-----------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------+
+----------+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|          | 20220619110706_cli_create_column_user_lastname                         |
|          | 20220619110540_cli_create_column_user_firstname                        |
| migrated | 20220619110404_cli_create_table_users                                  |
+----------+------------------------------------------------------------------------+

From the information presented in the two tables you can see how many migration files are in your application and of those how many have already been applied and available to be applied. You are also presented with the datasource name and database type information.

wheels dbmigrate latest

This command will migrate the database to the latest version. This command will apply each migration file from the current state all the way to the latest one at a time. If a SQL error is encountered in one of the files, the command will stop at that point and report the error.

wheels dbmigrate latest

wheels dbmigrate reset

This command will migrate the database to version 0 effectively resetting the database to nothing.

wheels dbmigrate reset

wheels dbmigrate up

This command will process the next migration file from the current state. If the database is already at the latest version this command will have no effect.

wheels dbmigrate up

wheels dbmigrate down

This command will reverse the current migration file and take the database one step backwards. If the database is already at version 0 then this command will have no effect.

wheels dbmigrate down

wheels dbmigrate exec

This command will run a particular migration file and take the database to that version. The four directional migration commands above latest, reset, up, and down each in turn call this command to process their intended action.

wheels dbmigrate exec [version]

wheels dbmigrate create table

This command will generate a new migration file for creating a table in the database. Keep in mind you will still have to run the migration file but this will add it to the migration history.

wheels dbmigrate create table [name] [force] [id] [primaryKey]

wheels dbmigrate create column

This command will generate a new migration file for adding a new column to an existing table.

wheels dbmigrate create column [name] [columnType] [columnName] [default] [null] [limit] [precision] [scale]

wheels dbmigrate create blank

wheels dbmigrate remove table

This command generates a migration file to remove a table. The migration file is will still need to be run individual but this command gets the migration generated and into the history.

wheels dbmigrate remove table [name]

Wheels is quite simple when it comes to figuring out how incoming requests map to code in your application. Let's look at a URL for an e-commerce website and dissect it a little.

But before we do that, a quick introduction to URLs in Wheels is in order.

A Wheels URL

URLs in Wheels generally look something like this:

http://localhost/index.cfm/shop/products

It's also possible that the URLs will look like this in your application:

http://localhost/index.cfm?controller=shop&action=products

This happens when your web server does not support the cgi.path_info variable.

Regardless of your specific setup, Wheels will try to figure out how to handle the URLs. If Wheels fails to do this properly (i.e. you know that your web server supports cgi.path_info, but Wheels insists on creating the URLs with the query string format), you can override it by setting URLRewriting in app/config/settings.cfm to either On, Partial, or Off. The line of code should look something like this:

set(URLRewriting="Partial");

"Partial URL Rewriting" is what we call that first URL up there with the /index.cfm/ format.

In the example URLs used above, shop is the name of the controller to call, and products is the name of the action to call on that controller.

Model-View-Controller Explained

Unless you're familiar with the Model-View-Controller pattern, you're probably wondering what controllers and actions are.

Put very simply, a controller takes an incoming request and, based on the parameters in the URL, decides what (if any) data to get from the model (which in most cases means your database), and decides which view (which in most cases means a CFML file producing HTML output) to display to the user.

An action is an entire process of executing code in the controller, including a view file and rendering the result to the browser. As you will see in the example below, an action usually maps directly to one specific function with the same name in the controller file.

Creating URLs

Mapping an incoming URL to code is only one side of the equation. You will also need a way to create these URLs. This is done through a variety of different functions like linkTo() (for creating links), startFormTag() (for creating forms), and redirectTo() (for redirecting users), to name a few.

Internally, all of these functions use the same code to create the URL, namely the URLFor() function. The URLFor() function accepts a controller and an action argument, which are what you will use most of the time. It has a lot of other arguments and does some neat stuff (like defaulting to the current controller when you don't specifically pass one in). So check out the documentation for the URLFor() function for all the details.

By the way, by using URL rewriting in Apache or IIS, you can completely get rid of the index.cfm part of the URL so that http://localhost/index.cfm/shop/products becomes http://localhost/shop/products. You can read more about this in the URL Rewriting chapter.

For the remainder of this chapter, we'll type out the URLs in this shorter and prettier way.

A Wheels Page

Let's look a little closer at what happens when Wheels receives this example incoming request.

First, it will create an instance of the shop controller (app/controllers/Shop.cfc) and call the function inside it named products.

Let's show how the code for the products function could look to make it more clear what goes on:

component extends="Controller" {

    function products() {
        renderView(controller="shop", action="products");
    }

}

The only thing this does is specify the view page to render using the renderView() function.