CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sqlcoldfusion
Adam Bourg
Adam Bourg

Reputation: 59

Building a ColdFusion Application with Version Control

We have a CMS built entirely in house. I'm the new web developer guy with literally 4 weeks of ColdFusion Experience. What I want to do is add version control to our dynamic pages. Something like what Wordpress does. When you modify a page in Wordpress it makes some database entires and keeps a copy of each page when you save it. So if you create a page and modifiy it 6 times, all in one day you have 7 different versions to roll back if necessary. Is there a easy way to do something similar in Coldfusion?

Please note I'm not talking about source control or version control of actual CFM files, all pages are done on the backend dynamically using SQL.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 465

Answers (4)

orangepips
orangepips

Reputation: 9971

For realtime page generation from the database, your best bet are "live" and "versioned" tables. Reason being keeping all data, live and versioned, in one table will negatively impact performance. So if page generation relies on a single SELECT query from the live table you can easily version the result set using ColdFusion's Web Distributed Data eXchange format (wddx) via the tag <cfwddx>. WDDX is a serialized data format that works particularly well with ColdFusion data (sorta like Python's pickle, albeit without the ability to deal with objects).

The versioned table could be as such: 

PageID
Created 
Data

Where data is the column storing the WDDX.

Note, you could also use built-in JSON support as well for version serialization (serializeJSON & deserializeJSON), but cfwddx tends to be more stable.

Upvotes: 0

Yisroel
Yisroel

Reputation: 8174

Jas' solution works well if most of the changes are to one field, for example the full text of a page of content.

However, if you have many fields, and people only tend to change one or two at a time, a new entry in to the table for each version can quickly get out of hand, with many almost identical versions in the history.

In this case what i like to do is store the changes on a per field basis in a table ChangeHistory. I include the table name, row ID, field name, previous value, new value, and who made the change and when.

This acts as a complete change history for any field in any table. I'm also able to view changes by record, by user, or by field.

Upvotes: 0

Jas Panesar
Jas Panesar

Reputation: 6639

One way (there are many) to do this is to add a column called "version" and a column called "live" in the table where you're storing all of your cms pages.

The column called live is option but might make it easier for your in some ways when starting out.

The column "version" will tell you what revision number of a document in the CMS you have. By a process of elimination you could say the newest one (highest version #) would be the latest and live one. However, you may need to override this some time and turn an old page live, which is what the "live" setting can be set to.

So when you click "edit" on a page, you would take that version that was clicked, and copy it into a new higher version number. It stays as a draft until you click publish (at which time it's written as 'live')..

I hope that helps. This kind of an approach should work okay with most schema designs but I can't say for sure either without seeing it.

Upvotes: 2

scrittler
scrittler

Reputation: 1121

sure you can. just stash the page content in another database table. you can do that with ColdFusion or via a trigger in the database.

Upvotes: 4

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