Using <cfinvoke> in ColdFusion

Question

I would like to write a server-side validation code to validate all user inputs on my page. I would like to keep all these server-side validations from the presentation layer. Now I am looking into creating a component and keep all validation functions inside it. I will use <cfinvoke> tag to access validation methods on my user page. But the problem is I have to apply validation on around 50 user inputs and need to use <cfinvoke> tag 50 times. Can anyone tell me that using <cfinvoke> many times will affect performance or is there any other better approach that I can go with?

Answer 1

There's no noticable overhead using <cfinvoke>. But I would still recommend you to avoid it here. Instead consider this (example):

Validator.cfc

<cfcomponent>

    <cffunction name="validateX" access="public" ...>
        ...
    </cffunction>
    <cffunction name="validateY" access="public" ...>
        ...
    </cffunction>
    <cffunction name="validateZ" access="public" ...>
        ...
    </cffunction>

</cfcomponent>

controller.cfm

<cfset validator = new Validator()>

<cfset validator.validateX(...)>
<cfset validator.validateY(...)>
<cfset validator.validateZ(...)>
...

Now you can easily work with the validation result.

If you return boolean:

<cfif validator.validateX(...)>
    ...
<cfelse>
    ...
</cfif>

If you return an array with errors:

<cfset errors = []>
<cfset errors.addAll( validator.validateX(...) )>
<cfset errors.addAll( validator.validateY(...) )>
<cfset errors.addAll( validator.validateZ(...) )>

etc.

<cfinvoke> creates an instance of the Class (new Validator()) and invokes the method validateX(...) the same way. The major difference is: the instance is created on every <cfinvoke> anew and the return has to be specified as input variable (returnVariable), which is cumbersome in most cases.