Here's a question - how would you handle persistence in a ColdFusion Builder extension? Most extensions are "fire and forget" - they may have a few steps but in general the idea is - take some input, do some action, return some output. There are - however - times when you may want to remember stuff. For example, perhaps your extension has numerous options and you simply want to remember what the user picked last time. A while ago I released a component called builderHelper. This component wrapped up common tasks for extension developers and aimed to make working with the XML dialect of CFB extensions even simpler. Today I whipped up a super simple method of persistence. Any extension making use of builderHelper can store settings use name/value pairs. The name must be unique per extension and the value can be anything that is serializable by JSON:

<cfset helper = createObject("component", "testingzone.builderHelper.builderHelper").init(ideeventinfo)> <cfset prefs = helper.getStorageItem("prefs")> <cfdump var="#prefs#">

<cfset helper.setStorageItem("prefs", {x=1})>

In this code sample I initialize builderHelper with my ideeventinfo packet. I then ask for and dump a value called prefs. The first time I run this it will be blank. Then I set a value, in this case a struct with one key. The second time I run this particular extension it will get the structure back. A pretty trivial example but hopefully you get the idea.

You can download this code at the RIAForge project: http://builderhelper.riaforge.org/