CF9 EntityDelete: How to delete entities

Question

If I have an array of entities, whats the easiest way of deleting the entire array of entities (or to put it this way, the entire ORM table)? I have:

<cfset allUsers = EntityLoad("User", {}, false)/>

Now to delete all the entities, would I use some sort of a loop? If so, how do I access individual entity primary keys within? I tried:

<cfset userTemp = EntityLoad("User", allUsers[i].User.userID, true) /> 

but that didn't work...

Answer 1

EntityLoad will return an array of the entity objects so we can loop over that and use entityDelete:

<cfloop array="#allUsers#" index="User">
   <cfset entityDelete( User )>
</cfloop>

As ever when deleting data be careful! I generally prefer a soft delete.

Answer 2

If you wish to use array notation, you do it like this.

<cfloop from="1" to="#arraylen(allUsers)#" index="i">
    <cfset entityDelete( allUsers[i] )>
</cfloop>

Another way to do this without making ColdFusion do all the work is to execute a query.

<cfset ormexecutequery("DELETE FROM User",true)>

Answer 3

If deleting the array (in terms of freeing memory) is what you want to do, the following should work:

<cfset allUsers = "">
<!--- or --->
<cfset StructDelete(variables, "allUsers")>

Of course this would only remove one reference. If the objects (allUsers or the individual array members) are referenced someplace else, these references would continue to work.