The Conversion: Trips for Keeps - Part 2

Ack! A few days off work and then updates to other applications that needed to be made has delayed more work on TRIPS. But we're back and ready to continue.

In the last post, we started to build out the trip.html template and it's corresponding controller. The dataService was updated with an abstraction that would allow a CFC method to be called and data to be passed.  This post will focus on retrieving that data from the dataService to the CFC method.

Before we get started, I thought it would be kind of cool to keep a count of the number of lines of code for the project.  I'm not sure if it will provide any insight, but it might be nice to compare the line count to the number of lines in the Flex application.  Rather than posting the counts on each blog post, I have created a separate post tracking the line count per post.

In review, let's take a look at the dataService code that's going to call the Coldfusion function to save the trip information.

 this.process = function(_method, _data){  
     var _params = {objectData: JSON.stringify(_data)}  
     return $http({  
       method: 'POST',  
       url: 'trips.cfc?method=' + _method,  
       headers: {  
         'Content-Type': undefined  
       },  
       data: _params  
     }).then(function successCallback(response){  
         console.log(response.data);  
         return response;  
       },  
       function errorCallback(response){  
         console.log('ruh-roh')  
       }  
     );  
   }  

The _method parameter is going to be the name of the CFC function, in this case saveTrip. The _data parameter is the trip object, initially returned by the getTrip CFC function and potentially modified in the trip.html.

 <cffunction name="saveTrip" returnformat="json" returntype="struct" access="remote">  
   <cfset _params = getHttpRequestData()>  
      <cfset _content = deserializeJSON(_params.content)>  
      <cfset _trip = deserializeJSON(_content.objectData)>  
   <cfreturn _trip>  
 </cffunction>  

The core of saveTrip is the CF getHttpRequestData() function. This function will return any information sent over from the $HTTP call. So let's take a look and see what the initial request data looks like.

 <cfset _params = getHttpRequestData()>  

The getHttpRequestData() function returns a structure with, in this case, four properties: content, headers, method, protocol. For saving data, the one we are interested in is the content property. But you can see it's not quite in the format we need. So let's deserializeJSON() the content property.

 <cfset _content = deserializeJSON(_params.content)>  

So now we have a structure with one property, objectData, which is in the content of the data parameter in the $http request. But the objectData value is still not how we need it to save our trip information. So we need to do one more deserializeJSON() to fully realize the trip data structure.

 <cfset _trip = deserializeJSON(_content.objectData)>  

Now we have a structure that we can very easily work with to save our trip data.  Stay tuned for Part 3 where we actually save the trip data to the database and continue building out the trip.html template.