MVC Form Handling with ColdBox, ColdSpring, and Transfer. Does this seem right?

So I have been working on my first ColdBox application the last couple of week, and one of the things I have been struggling with is Form Handling and Validation. I have not been struggling because these concepts are difficult, but with not knowing how they should be implemented in ColdBox or any other MVC framework.

The heart of my question is, when I want to display a form with values pre-populated (like when a user clicks on an 'edit' button for page in a CMS), do I pass the whole bean to the view for insertion into the input tags using getter and setter methods, or do I use the getter and setter methods in the controller to insert the values into the event/request context object and then using the events getValue and setValue() method in the view?

I have been doing the latter. Here are some examples.

First, the user browses to where they can add/edit a page, by calling the pages.edit event:

So the 'event' and 'pageid' URL parameters get added to the request context and the request context is passed to the event handler, which looks like this:

Here is what is going on:

1. First, var scoped variables are set for the page bean (oPage) and the page service (pageService). The page service receives the pageService object from ColdSpring through the getPlugin() controller method in ColdBox
2. Next, I check to see if the pageid was passed in the event/rc object. If it was, I use it to ask the pageService object for a bean populated from the database (the page service uses Transfer for this).
3. If a page id was not passed in, then I know that this is a request for a new page, so I call the same method from the page service, but with no param. (This could be done with one function call, but...). I then set default values into the bean for later use in the form.
4. After I have a bean prepared, either with values from the database, or with no values except for the defaults I inserted, I then use the Event.paramValue() method in ColdBox to add those values to the Event object. I am using paramValue() instead of setValue() because I do not want the bean to override the values that may have been passed in with the form and added to the event object.
5. Finally, I set the view to display the pageEdit.cfm page that has the edit form on it.

Now, in the pageEdit.cfm page, I using this code:

Ignore all of the <cf_label> tags. They are a simple custom tag I use for laying out forms.

Here is what is going on:

1. The first line will simply display an error message from the request context if I set one. You will see where I set this in the post event coming up
2. The form is posting to itself. (Yes Luis, I know I should be using exit handlers. I only just learned what they were 2 days ago and I have not implemented them yet :)
3. I am using simple hidden fields to pass in the name of the event (pages.editPost) that I want to handle the form and to pass in the pageid (The pageid will be a UUID if it was an edit request or it will be '00000000-0000-0000-0000000000000000' if it is a request for a new page).
4. I then populate each of the form fields, radio buttons, etc using the event.getValue() method from the request context. I am using Iif() in several place to determine which radio button should have checked="true"

So this form gets posted to me pages.editPost event handler. Here is what that looks like.

1. First, I am receiving the event argument(request context) as I would for any event handler. This object will contain all of my form field values that were posted.
2. I set var scoped variables for an error array(aErrors), a page bean(oPage), and the page service(pageService)
3. I do my error checking. For simplicity I have made pageName the only required value. I check to make sure it exists and contains a value. If it does not pass error checking, an error is set using the messagebox plugin and the next event is set.
4. If the form passes error checking then we move on to the form processing.
5. The pageService is used to request the page bean, the pageid is passed in. The pageService will determine if a new bean should be created or if it should get the values from the DB.
6. Using the beanFactory plugin in ColdBox I populate the bean from the values posted in the form.
7. Then I pass the page bean to the page service to be saved. It will use Transfer to determine if it should INSERT a new record in the DB or UPDATE an existing record.
8. If all goes well (usually I would use a try/catch here) then I set a messagebox value saying the request was completed.
9. Finally, we set the next event to go back to the edit form so that the user can make additional edits and so that the message (or errors) can be displayed. This setNextEvent() method is telling the controller that the next event is 'pages.edit, that there is no query string, that it should not append the session token, and that it should persists the pageid value so that the pages.edit handler can load the correct bean.

Wow! That was a lot of typing. I hope someone takes the time to read it and correct me if I am doing something foolish, wrong, or at least not inline with best practices. I am really enjoying working with ColdBox, ColdSpring and Transfer. I have no doubt this would be just as thrilling in any other set of frameworks.

If you have made it this far, thanks for taking the time. I would love to hear feedback.