I’ve been using ColdFusion 9’s ORM features on a couple projects recently. That coupled with Sean Corfield’s excellent FW/1 framework has made short work of a lot of time-consuming tasks. Anyway, I’ve ran into a little bit of a snag around referential integrity.

If I use entityDelete() function to delete a record and there’s a constraint violation (in this case, a song  category that’s associated with a song), I get the following error:

coldfusion.orm.hibernate.HibernateSessionException: Cannot delete or update a parent row: a foreign key constraint fails (`databasename`.`songs`, CONSTRAINT `songs_ibfk_3` FOREIGN KEY (`SongCategoryID`) REFERENCES `songcategories` (`SongCategoryID`)). (Database)

That’s obviously to be expected. Constraints are put in place to prevent such things. However, for whatever reason I can’t trap this error using try/catch.

<cfscript>
	transaction action="begin" {
		try {
			entityDelete(local.objSongCategory);
		} catch (Any e) {
			transaction action="rollback";
		}
	}
</cfscript>

I can't think of any reason why this cannot be caught. Anyone have any thoughts?

I always liked the occurrence highlighting featured in a number of text editors, including Notepad++. Double-click on a word somewhere and the editor highlights other places in the same file where that word appears. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised to find this was something CFElipse has offered for some time and it's been under my nose the whole time.

On the toolbar is a non-descript 'forward arrow' looking button. Click it and occurrence highlighting is on. Alternatively, you can use ALT+SHIFT+O to toggle.

I didn't care for the default gray highlight color -- wanted something that stands out a bit more. After a bit more poking around, I found this could be changed in the Eclipse Preferences window under General > Editors > Text Editors > Annotations. In the annotation types list, you'll find a 'CFEclipse Mark Occurrence' option. Change the display options to your liking.

During the software development process, I've found most clients have a hard time visualizing what you're planning on building them -- even with extremely detailed specifications. In the past, I've used slick product called Balsamiq for building mock-ups of the user interface and business processes. Including these visual aids along with the specs made things a lot clearer for the client as to what they were getting. If something wasn't quite how they wanted it, everything could be quickly modified, long before a line of code was written. The amount of time saved on one project alone could easily justify it's $80 price tag.

As luck would have it, I've run across something even better. Evolus has a similar prototyping tool called Pencil which has the fast majority of the features Balsamiq offers, and then some. Among these are the ability to have more than one mock-up per document (I remember having a whole folder of mock-ups per project when I used Balsamiq). Pencil also offers native interface widgets, in addition to the sketchy style. While Balsamiq offers sketchy only, they do have a lot more widgets.

Pencil is built on the Mozilla Framework, and although I prefer the standalone version, it's also available as a Firefox plug-in. Best part is its price tag: free! Licensed under the GPL (version 2), it's available under Windows and several flavors of Linux. Sounds like a Mac version is also in the works. Overall, I love the software and look forward to using it more.