I ran into a strange error yesterday that I couldn't seem to find out what was happening.

I was getting coldfusion.runtime.TemplateProxy cannot be cast to java.lang.String when trying to save an entity using ColdFusion ORM.  

Google was turning up nothing, so I started systematically removing lines of code.  It started working when I removed the line that did an entityLoad on a different object.  What was weird was I was just using that object to get a bit of data and not even for the object I was saving that caused everything to go boom, and if I removed the save, everything worked fine.  Then I remembered that the Hibernate session is affected so I took a deeper look at the entity that a loaded.  Sure enough, I was autowiring a property and didn't have persistent="false" on that property, causing it to throw the "coldfusion.runtime.TemplateProxy cannot be cast to java.lang.String" error.

Changing it from something like this

property name="shippingOriginationZip" inject="coldbox:setting:shippingOriginationZip";

to this

property name="shippingOriginationZip" inject="coldbox:setting:shippingOriginationZip" persistent="false";

fixed it all up.  Of course, like all coding solutions happen, this was in the middle of the night when I was no longer working on the code that this came to me.

So remember folks, if you have a property in an persistent CFC that is not persistent, be sure to say so!