Bob's Blog

As promised, the slide deck from my presentation at CFUnited about ValidateThis, a validation framework for ColdFusion, is now available. Download it in PDF format here. Here's a description of the session:

Automagic Validations for ColdFusion Objects

This session will provide an overview of, as well as a detailed how-to about a Validation framework for ColdFusion. The title is a slight misnomer, as, although the framework was originally written to work inside an object-oriented application, and remains an ideal solution for that, it has recently been enhanced to work with simple ColdFusion structures as well. This means that anyone who is looking for a better way of addressing their validation requirements, both on the client side and on the server side, can now benefit from the framework, even if they are not using objects.

The main benefit of the framework is that it will automatically generate all of your client-side and server-side validations for you, from a simple set of metadata. This frees you from the drudgery of writing similar validation code over and over again, and also eliminates the possibility of adding bugs into your application via your validation code. The framework, called ValidateThis, is being actively developed by myself and a number of other contributors, so not only is it extremely functional and flexible right now, but new features are being added continually. If you are interested in finding out more about it, including exactly how to implement it in a new or existing application (and it's dead easy), I encourage you to take a look at the material.