Question

Can someone explain how the FW1 service call works? As I read the section from the manual below. I thought the following should work.

See: https://github.com/seancorfield/fw1/wiki/Reference-Manual

A service method is passed a collection of named arguments, based on whatever is in the request context after the controller methods have executed (i.e., after before(), startItem() and item() ). A service method may return a result, which is placed into the request context by FW/1. By default, FW/1 1.x stores the result of the (initial) service method call in rc.data.

controller/comparables.cfc

component { 
    public any function init( fw ) {
        variables.fw = fw;
        return this;
    }
    
    
    public void function autocomplete( rc ) {
        // queue up a specific service (comparables.autocomplete) with named result (autocomplete)
        var args = StructNew();
        StructInsert( args, "table", "The Table" );
        StructInsert( args, "column", "The Column" );
        variables.fw.service( 'comparables.autocomplete', 'autocomplete', args );
    }
}

service/comparables.cfc

component { 
    public any function autocomplete( string table, string column, string term ) {      
        return "not yet implemented #table# #column# #term#";
    }
}

The following view displays rc.autocomplete = "not yet implemented"

views/comparables/autocomplete.cfm

<cfdump var="#variables.rc#" >

Answer 1

I was finally able figure out how it all fits together.
The following service call would return a value immediately whereas the above would not be called until the controller method has finished.

comp_serv = CreateObject("component","services.comparables");
rc.comparables = comp_serv.autocomplete( "table","colum","term" );