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Getting Started Guide

The ColdBox HMVC Platform is the de-facto enterprise-level HMVC framework for CFML developers.

The ColdBox HMVC Platform is the de-facto enterprise-level HMVC framework for CFML developers. It's professionally backed, highly extensible, and productive. Getting started with ColdBox is quick and painless. The only thing you need to begin is CommandBox, a command line tool for CFML developers. Please remember to Star us in Github.

This is a one-page introductory guide to ColdBox. If you are new to MVC or ColdBox, you can also leverage our 60 minute quick start guide as well.

ColdBox Site Quickstart

Need Help

The Ortus Community is the way to get any help for our entire platform and modules: https://community.ortussolutions.com

IDE Tools

ColdBox has the following supported IDE Tools:

Install CommandBox and ColdBox CLI

You can read through our one-page CommandBox Getting Started Guide. Or simply grab the CommandBox executable from the download page and double click it to run.

http://www.ortussolutions.com/products/commandbox

You should now be seeing a prompt that looks like this:

Now let's install the ColdBox CLI

install coldbox-cli

Now you will have the coldbox namespace of commands. Run coldbox help and discover it.

Create A New Site

Now we're cooking with gas! Let's create a new ColdBox application. CommandBox comes with built-in commands for scaffolding out new sites as well as installing ColdBox and other libraries. We'll start by changing into an empty directory where we want our new app to live. If necessary, you can create a new folder.

mkdir playground --cd

Now let's ask CommandBox to create a new ColdBox app for us.

coldbox create app MyPlayground

Tip: You can find many scaffolding templates for ColdBox in our Github organization: github.com/coldbox-templates

You can also issue a coldbox create app help command and get help for the creation command.

File/Folder Conventions

This command will place several new folders and files in your working directory. Let's run the ls command to view them.

ls

Here's a rundown of the important bits (Even though they might be more generated files/folders)

  • coldbox - This is the ColdBox framework managed by CommandBox

  • config/Coldbox.cfc - Your application configuration object

  • config/Router.cfc - Your application URL Router

  • handlers - Your controller layer, which in ColdBox they are called event handlers

  • layouts - Your HTML layouts

  • models - This holds your model CFCs

  • modules - This holds the CommandBox tracked modules

  • modules_app - This holds your app's modules

  • tests - Your test harness for unit and integration testing

  • views - Your HTML views will go here

Start It Up

Now that our shiny new MVC app is ready let's fire it up using the embedded server built into CommandBox. You don't need any other software installed on your PC for this to work. CommandBox has it all!

server start

In a few seconds, a browser window will appear with your running application. This is a full server with access to the web administrator, where you can add data sources, and mappings, or adjust the server settings. Notice the handy icon added to your system tray as well. The --rewritesEnable flag will turn on some basic URL rewriting so we have nice, pretty URLs.

Tip: If you are creating an app to run on any server other than the CommandBox server, you will need to set up URL rewriting manually. More info here: /the-basics/routing/requirements

Take A Look Around

ColdBox uses easy conventions to define the controllers and views in your app. Let's open up our main app controller in your default editor to have a looksie.

edit handlers/Main.cfc

At the top, you'll see a function named index. This represents the default action that runs for this controller, which in ColdBox land they are referred to as event handlers.

// Default Action
function index( event, rc, prc ){
    prc.welcomeMessage = "Welcome to ColdBox!";
    event.setView( "main/index" );
}

Now let's take a look in the main/index view. It's located int he views folder.

edit views/main/index.cfm

This line of code near the top of the view outputs the prc.welcomeMessage variable we set in the controller.

<h1>#prc.welcomeMessage#</h1>

Try changing the value being set in the handler and refresh your browser to see the change.

prc.welcomeMessage = "This is my new welcome message";

Building On

Let's define a new event handler now. Your controllers act as event handlers to respond to requests, REST API, or remote proxies.

Pull up CommandBox again and run this command.

coldbox create handler helloWorld index,add,edit,list --open

That's it! You don't need to add any special configuration to declare your handler. Now we have a new handler called helloWorld with actions index, add, edit, and list. The command also created a test case for our handler as well as stubbed-out views for each of the actions.

Let's hit this new controller we created with a URL like so. Your port number will probably be different.

127.0.0.1:43272/helloWorld

Normally the URL would have index.cfm before the /helloWorld bit, but our --rewritesEnable flag when we started the server makes this nicer URL possible.

Install Packages

ColdBox's MVC is simple, but its true power comes from the wide selection of modules you can install into your app for additional functionality. You can checkout the full list of modules available on the FORGEBOX directory: www.forgebox.io.

Here's some useful examples:

  • BCrypt -- Industry-standard password hashing

  • cbdebugger -- For debugging Coldbox apps

  • cbjavaloader - For interacting with Java classes and libraries

  • cbMarkdown - For writing in markdown

  • cbMessagebox -- Display nice error/success messages

  • cborm -- Awesome ORM Services

  • cb18n -- For multilingual sites

  • cbt - ColdBox templating language

  • cbValidation - Back-end validation framework

  • qb - Fluent query builder and schema builder

  • route-visualizer - For visualizing your application routes

Install cbmessagebox from the CommandBox prompt like this:

install cbmessagebox

We can see the full list of packages by using the list command.

list

Dependency Hierarchy for myApp (0.0.0)
+-- cbmessagebox (1.0.0)
+-- coldbox (4.0.0)

Right now we can see that our app depends on coldbox and cbmessagebox to run. We'll use our new cbmessagebox module in a few minutes. But first, we'll create a simple Model CFC to round out our MVC app.

Creating A Model

Models encapsulate the business logic of your application. They can be services, entities, or DAOs. We'll use CommandBox to create a GreeterService in our new app with a sayHello method.

coldbox create service GreeterService sayHello --open

Tip: The --open is a nice shortcut that opens our new model in our default editor after creating it.

Let's finish implementing the sayHello() method by adding this return statement and save the file.

We can also add the word singleton to the component declaration. This will tell WireBox to only create one instance of our service.

component singleton {

    function sayHello(){
        return 'Hey you, have an awesome day!';
    }

}

What is WireBox?

WireBox is a dependency injection framework that is included with ColdBox. It will manage all object creations, persistence and assembling. You don't have to worry about using new or createobject() for CFCs anymore.

Tie It All Together

Ok, let's open up that helloWorld handler we created a while back. Remember, you can hit tab while typing to auto-complete your file names.

edit handlers/helloWorld.cfc

We'll inject our greeterService and the cbmessagebox service into the handler by adding these properties to the top of /handlers/helloWorld.cfc.

What is this magical injection? Injection is a way to get references of other objects placed in the variables scope of other objects. This makes your life easier as you don't have to manually create objects or even know where they exist.

This will put the instance of our services in the variables scope where we can access it in our action methods.

component {

    property name='greeterService' inject='greeterService';
    property name='messageBox' inject='@cbmessagebox';

    ...
}

And now, in our index method, we'll set the output of our service into an info message.

function index( event, rc, prc ){
    messageBox.info( greeterService.sayHello() );
    event.setView( "helloWorld/index" );
}

One final piece. Open up the default layout located in layouts/Main.cfm and find the #view()#. Add this line right before it to render out the message box that we set in our handler.

#cbMessagebox().renderIt()#
<div class="container">#view()#</div>

Here we leverage the cbMessagebox() helper function which the MessageBox module collaborates to all layouts, views, handlers and interceptors.

Now hit your helloWorld handler one final time with ?fwreinit=1 in the URL to see it all in action! (Again, your port number will most likely be different.

127.0.0.1:43272/helloWorld?fwreinit=1

What's Next?

Congratulations! In a matter of minutes, you have created a full MVC application. You installed a community module from ForgeBox, created a new handler/view, and tied in business logic from a service model.

As easy as that was, you're just scratching the surface of what ColdBox can do for you. Continue reading this book to learn more about:

  • Environment-specific configuration

  • Easy SES URL routing

  • Tons of 3rd party modules

  • Drop-in security system

  • Sweet REST web service support

Getting Help

If you run into issues or have questions, please jump on our Ortus Community and our Slack team and ask away.

ColdBox is Professional Open Source under the Apache 2.0 license. We'd love to have your help with the product.

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