Preview of New Code Creator

Posted At : April 14, 2006 1:08 PM | Posted By : Steve
Related Categories: Productivity,ColdFusion

Recently, a few ColdFusion programmers have written code generators. I was pretty excited about this until I realized that they don't write code the way I write code. I figured I wasn't the only one to want code generation "my way".

So, I started work on a code creator that would write code however you want it. The code creator provides a wizard and tools for creating a code generator. The generator is a cfc that extends a provided Generator.cfc. Each generator would take the information from the wizard and creates code from it.

Keep in mind that this is just a preview at this point. That being said, feel free to take a look and give me any feedback.

http://www.bryantwebconsulting.com/clients/generator/

I know it still needs plenty of work, but I am curious if this is something that others would find useful and what improvements other see that it needs.

Things I know that I need to add:

  • The ability to select the type of form field based on the datatype.
  • Limit the length of the form fields based on the length allowed in a column.
My hope (perhaps idealistic) would be that we could get some generators to create code for the different popular frameworks. This would make it more generally useful and provide another means of learning and comparing frameworks.

Incidentally, I am currently calling this "Configurable Code Creator", though I am not committed to that name, so I am open to suggestions.

This code is built on several other tools on which I have been working. Namely sebtags, DataMgr, and tag.cfc (now in version 0.2). I hope to write more about each of these in the future.

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I downloaded it and figured out how to set the datasources, I ran it against a sql database and it barfed on a datatype varbinary but that was actually good because the field wasn't supposed to be varbinary so I caught an error on my part, but it also couldn't find the custom tag cf_sebForm. I guess I need to copy all of those tags into my custom tag folder?
# Posted By michael white | 4/15/06 12:42 AM
oh, and by the way, I love the skinning of the forms.
# Posted By michael white | 4/15/06 12:45 AM
Michael,

Good observation. I should have pointed out the the generators available now both require the use of my free sebForm and sebTable (and related) custom tags.

Additionally, the "sebtags with CFCs" generator requires the use of my free Datamgr component.

I need to add some new generators that don't require my tools (probably one with vanilla html and one with cfform). I started with the ones I did mostly for selfish reasons (it made the tool immediately useful to me).

Thanks for the feedback!
# Posted By | 4/15/06 12:14 PM
I should add that the DataMgr component and all of the custom tags required to use the code generated by the "sebtags" or "sebtags with CFCs" generators are included in the download for the code creator.
# Posted By | 4/15/06 12:44 PM
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