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ajaxCFC Issue

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:55:59 GMT

Hello All,
Does anyone have any thoughts on why this page (w/ ajaxCFC) works in FF, but
not IE?

http://www.castlesandestates.com/index.cfm?view=agents2&agentType=IRES

Here is my JS code..
http://codeshare.ulatu.com/oct2df1b

Here is my cfc..
http://codeshare.ulatu.com/octafb05

The JS function that doesn't seem to be working in IE is "getStates()"

Could it have something to do with this Knowledge Base article?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/276228

It appears that addOptions() in the util.js file does you innerHTML.

Good Day!
Ryan

PayPal and ColdFusion

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 01:39:33 GMT

Does anyone out there have any experience with using PayPal and ColdFusion together? I've been Googling tonight and it looks like the easiest way is to use IPN and generate individual buttons for each product. With the possibility of 30 or 40 products I'd hate to have to make a new button for each product. Is there anyway around this?

Good Day!
Ryan

ColdFusion 8 Released!!

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:30:57 GMT

ColdFusion 8 is finally here and here is a summary of features..

Performance increases
Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software delivers significant performance improvements over all earlier releases of the product.

Server Monitor
ColdFusion 8 introduces the new Server Monitor and Multiserver Monitor. By providing information about the server — including requests, queries, memory usage, and errors — the Server Monitor allows you to troubleshoot and fine-tune applications in development and in production. You can also set alerts and other actions to help prevent memory problems, slow pages, or other issues that would negatively impact a user's experience with the application.

PDF features
ColdFusion 8 applications can dynamically generate and interact with PDF documents and forms for a printable, portable way to intelligently capture and share information.

Ajax features
ColdFusion 8 can easily provide data to existing Ajax applications and frameworks. You can use simple tags to access a large library of prebuilt Ajax user interface components such as rich text editors, data grids, tree controls, tab navigators, and more.

.NET integration
With ColdFusion 8, you can specify any .NET object — either local or remote — and use it in your ColdFusion application, just like any Java™ or other object resource.

Microsoft Exchange Server integration
ColdFusion 8 applications can programmatically access Exchange Server functionality such as calendars, tasks, and contacts.

Interactive debugger
ColdFusion 8 introduces an Eclipse™ plug-in debugger. Use it to set breakpoints, watch variables, and step through code, making it easier to debug all your application code.

Adobe Flex integration
ColdFusion 8 now includes Adobe LiveCycle® Data Services ES (formerly Flex™ Data Services) and other data exchange improvements to simplify the data-enabling of rich Internet applications (RIAs) you build with ColdFusion and Flex.

Per-application settings
ColdFusion 8 allows you to set ColdFusion mappings and custom tag paths on a per-application basis.

Multi-threading
ColdFusion 8 introduces the new CFTHREAD tag, which allows you to create, end, join together, or temporarily suspend the processing of specific ColdFusion threads.

Image manipulation
ColdFusion 8 adds more than 50 new tags and functions for creating and manipulating images, from simple to sophisticated. For example, the new CFIMAGE tag provides shortcuts to the most common image actions, including reading, writing, resizing, rotating, and converting images.

Presentations on demand
ColdFusion 8 allows you to dynamically create multimedia experiences and eLearning courses with animation, audio, and video. These high-quality, on-demand presentations are generated on the server with up-to-the-minute data and content from multiple external sources.

Atom and RSS feeds
ColdFusion 8 introduces the new CFFEED tag, which can read and create RSS and Atom feeds in commonly used formats, so you can quickly and easily create complex content syndication applications.

ZIP and JAR file features
ColdFusion 8 introduces two new tags, CFZIP and CFZIPPARAM, so you can manipulate ZIP and JAR files for working with file archives.

User-based Administrator and RDS access
ColdFusion 8 allows you to create multiple ColdFusion Administrator and Remote Development Services (RDS) accounts with individual permissions, so you can tailor Administrator and RDS access to fit your specific security needs. The roles assigned to a user determine which pages in the ColdFusion Administrator and which functions in the Administrator API a user can access.

Improved file manipulation functions
ColdFusion 8 adds several new file manipulation functions to the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), most notably the ability to read and write large files in defined segments, rather than in a single operation.

JavaScript operators in CFML
ColdFusion 8 supports common JavaScript operators such as ++, ==, ||, <, and > so they can be used in CFML expressions.

CFC improvements
ColdFusion 8 adds several highly requested improvements to ColdFusion components (CFCs), including the ability to create interface definitions, use J2EE session replication in a cluster, have access to the CFCs in session data across all the machines in a cluster, and use the new onMissing Method function.

Strong encryption libraries
ColdFusion 8 now includes RSA BSAFE Crypto-J libraries, which provide FIPs 140-certified strong encryption.

Reporting enhancements
ColdFusion 8 introduces a completely new version of the ColdFusion Report Builder. Use it to create high-quality, structured reports with more output choices and a more consistent look and feel throughout your applications. You can also create and apply cascading style sheet (CSS) definitions to reports, export your reports in HTML or XML format, and create report styles for all of your reports.

Database interaction improvements
ColdFusion 8 supports nested transactions, provides a new DBINFO tag to programmatically access information about a data source, allows stored procedures and queries using CFQUERYPARAM to be cached, and much more. Plus, there is expanded database driver support with new options for SQL Server 2005, Oracle 10g, Sybase ASE15, MySQL 4 and 5, PostgreSQL 8, and others.

Argument collections
ColdFusion 8 makes it much simpler to code tags with many attributes. You can now specify an argumentsCollection attribute in most tags to specify the tag's attributes in a single structure.

Array and structure creation improvements
ColdFusion 8 allows you to create arrays and structures implicitly in assignment statements without using the ArrayNew or Structnew functions. The result is cleaner code with less typing.

Expanded platform, OS, and database support
ColdFusion 8 offers broad platform support with notable additions of Mac OS X on Intel®, JBoss, 64-bit support on Solaris™, JDK 1.5 and JDK 1.6, and support for VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server.

Get you some !!

Good Day!
Ryan

My Most Common Error

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:43:11 GMT

For getting to put the damn semi colon ';' at the end of cfscript statements!!! God how annoying!!!

Good Day!
Ryan

ajaxCFC issue

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 00:59:29 GMT

Hey Everyone,
I have a pretty damn simple AJAX call on a new web site I'm setting up but it's not working. I get the dreaded "Invalid Reply from Server" message. According to Firebug the result I'm getting from AJAX call is blank. I have no idea where the problem is. Based on setting up test queries I know that the CFC in question long with ajax.cfc are both getting called however the function in question, getEvents does not get gett called. Below is my code.

Code loading the AJAX and JS files
[codeShare jul58920]

JS Code calling the CFC
[codeShare jul4b4ad]

CFC Function trying to return a single event
[codeShare jul6e422]

This is the part where I'm thinking I might have an issue. These are
the onRequest, onRequestStart and onRequestEnd Functions
[codeShare julcc9d2]

I remember reading something on Rob's blog about onRequest interupting
AJAX calls, but his solution, setAbortAfterRequest(true); in the
AJAX.cfc file did not have any effect on this issue.

Any thoughts? Am I missing something simple?

Good Day!
Ryan

CFEclipse News

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:26:56 GMT

Today, in a stint of cleaver marketing or a slip of the Google Talk chat, Mark Drew announced on Twitter that he's starting to work on CFEclipse 2.0! This is very exciting news. All ColdFusion developers using CFEclipse owe Mark Drew a lot of "thank yous" for the amount of time and effort he has put into this project.

Excerpt from Twitter's Google Talk bot:

markdrew: Can you keep a secret? Working on CFEclipse 2.0! :) (planning stage)
markdrew: Note to self, make sure you are not sending a message to twitter when you want to send it to a real person

Good Day!
Ryan

ColdFusion 8: cfimage

Thu, 31 May 2007 10:48:13 GMT

Just in case I have a loyal reader that doesn't also read Ray Camden's blog I wanted to share one of his recent posts with you. He has a great post on ColdFusion 8's new cfimage tag. Check it out here. Can't wait until this stuff comes to a sever near me!

Good Day!
Ryan

P.S. Here is another good post, validating of a file uploaded is and image. Awesome!!

Free CF8 Hosting

Thu, 31 May 2007 10:36:38 GMT

Just read over at <cfsilence> that Hostmysite is offering free ColdFusion 8 Beta hosting. Check it out here.

Good Day!
Ryan

New Google Gadget

Tue, 29 May 2007 17:30:09 GMT

Over the past month or so I’ve been fiddling, on and off, with creating my own Google Homepage Gadget. I’m addicted to my own personalized Google Homepage so which is why I got interested in the idea. It turned out to be super simple. To get started I did the default “hello world” gadget. With that under my belt it was time to make something dynamic. To make a long story short I created a ColdFusion page that outputted XML content using the <cfcontent> tag. However that I had some issues with caching using that method. It seems that Google caches gadget content for a day or sometimes longer. After searching the web for a while I found no solution that worked for my particular gadget. With my gadget I wanted to display pictures from my own personal web site and I wanted new pictures to show up each time the page was loaded. Then it hit me… an IFRAME!!! EUREKA!!! Below is my code so far, it could be prettier but it works.

Photo_feed.xml

This XML page is the actual gadget page that gets loaded into your personalized Google Homepage. It’s really simple, just xml page with containing HTML content, an IFRAME

[codeShare mayb038b]

Photo_feed.cfm

This page is the page that is included in the IFRAME code, it’s simple as well. Just query the database for 4 random photos and display them.

[codeShare may7947b]

Again the code above could be a lot cleaner, especially the photo_feed.cfm page, but I wanted to get this out there to give people and idea how easy it is to get started. What are your thoughts? Anyone else designed any gadgets yet?

Good Day!
Ryan

Looping over a Query Set as an Array

Wed, 16 May 2007 18:45:25 GMT

One day, not too long ago, my buddy Fro showed me a cool way to sum up values of a query set using the arraySum function in ColdFusion. Say you have a query that returns all of your baseball cards and their respective values. Well in this example you can do something like this

arraySum(qGetCards['cardValue'])

That function will sum up all of the "cardValue" values returned from the query.

What I ran into today was the fact that I didn't want to add up all the values, just part of them. For this I wrote the following script. It is looping through a query and only summing the amount where there is no expirationDate.

[codeShare mayb2df2]

Hope this helps someone, somewhere!

Good Day,
Ryan

Uploading Files

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 12:26:15 GMT

Do you ever have those days where you just say "man, I love coding!!!!"? Well that happened to me this morning when I was working on real estate site in my "free time". Of course with any real estate site you have a lot of photos, photos for properties, photos for agents and this site even has photos for property events, what ever those are??!! In the old'n days I would have just written out all that code to upload the file, move the file and rename the file. But for this project I decided to make a File Functions cfc file. This cfc has functions to rename, remove and upload photos. Needless to say creating this one function to handle all my file functions made the rest of my coding a lot easier. I

also made a series of structures in my application scope that hold important information such as the file directory location and file size. For example application.event.fullFilePath is the full directory path for event photos and application.event.fileSize is the width of those photos. I'm also using cool cfc called tmt_img.cfc to resize photos to the correct width when uploaded.

It may not be rocket science to everyone, but it sure made me think "man, I love coding!!!"

Here is my file functions cfc

[codeShare apr7b8d5]

Here is my code calling the file function cfc

[codeShare apr3ed9d]

How cool is all that???

Good Day!
Ryan

How do you fix it?

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:06:15 GMT

Since I haven't blogged in a while I thought I'd post this for you all. How do you fix this error in CF??

Error:"2007-02-29" is an invalid date or time string.
The error occurred on line 230.

Of course you have to take into account that in some years there will be a Feb. 29th!

Good Day!
Ryan

ColdFusion Scorpio Tour Announced!

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:00:02 GMT

Looks like Adobe has announced their tour for ColdFusion 8 (codenamed Scorpio). For a list of cities visit the Adobe Labs site here . It looks like Dallas will be stop number four. If you are in the Dallas area and would like more information on the tour stop (with Ben Forta) visit the DFW CFUG Site here.

Good Day!
Ryan

PS anyone else notice that the Adobe Labs Wiki site is PHP??? That ain't right!

Looping and cfscript

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 18:22:43 GMT

I came up with some ColdFusion code yesterday that I thought I'd share with you all. This might not be revolutionary to many people but it's pretty dang cool to me.

Without going into too much detail I need a way to add time off to a production database for all users when a manager entered in a holiday. It'd wouldn't be much fun if the manager had to enter in Christmas time off for each of his or her employees. So what I did was create some code that 1) called a CFC to get all of the employees and then 2) loop through the query of employees and add the submitted holiday time for each.

Like I said this might not be significant to most, but it's cool to me and it's all <cfscript> which I find cool.

First, execute a cfc to get a list of employees

CODE:
//returns a list of team members to add for this holiday
qSubTeam = application.gatewayTeam.getSubTeam    (
                                                subTeam_ID = 17,
                                                teamLead = 0
                                                );

Second, loop though the query getting the next employee's id. The cool part here is how I retrieve the UUID field. By using the current row, intRow, I am able to locate the appropriate UUID by referencing the record set as an array.

CODE:
// loop over the days from start to end and add them to the production log
for (
    intRow = 1;
    intRow LTE qSubTeam.recordCount;
    intRow = (intRow + 1)
    )
    {
        //get the employee to add holiday for
        variables.uuid = qSubTeam['UUID'][intRow];

        //do some other stuff here to add holiday for this employee...
    }

Anyway, just thought I'd share. Pretty damn cool to me. If you would like to see more of the code, it's available over at codeShare.

Good Day!
Ryan

Teaching ColdFusion

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 15:18:38 GMT

Yesterday I had the first of many phone calls with a fellow employee who wants to learn how to design web design. I don't think he particularly cares if that web design uses ColdFusion, ASP, or just plain jane HTML. However since he asked me for help he gets the ColdFusion. When it comes to training and helping people learn I believe I have a pretty good track record. The three that come to mind are both doing extremely well in their day to day careers as programmers now. However, how much of that is my doing vs. their own desire is unknown. To be a programmer you have to have that "want to desire" along with that desire to learn.

This time it's different however, this time the programmer in waiting is not located in the same location I am. He's not even located in the same state, or even the same time zone! How can I teach someone who isn't setting right next to me? There is something to be said for the ability to walk over and ask someone a question. Not that you can't ask questions over the phone, but I think you get my point. As mentioned above we started the learning process yesterday with our first call. He wants to take an process that is completed today on an Excel Spreadsheet and turn it in to a web application. Simple enough I thought to myself, but then I began to thinking. There is so much that I have learned over the 8+ years I've been coding. How do I pass that along in two hour phone conversations twice a week. Plus it's not just ColdFusion, it's HTML and CSS. The basics of web design. Not to mention the SQL!! After all what would the point be in learning CF without a database to talk to, right? Luckily for me he has taking the beginning courses of HTML and ColdFusion that my company offers, so we aren't starting completely from scratch. However there are some things that he has learned in those classes that are probably dated and that he'll have to unlearn.

So where to begin? Where do I begin to teach him the code that I write vs. the code that newbies write. Nothing against newbies, we were all there once, he needs to start somewhere. Do I let him write the ColdFusion code he learned in class or do I teach him the ColdFusion code I want on my server. After all this is my server, my web site, my baby and my job to fix it if it breaks and he isn't here. I've struggled with the idea of shoving him directly in to the OOish stuff I've been coding lately but Fro and I decided against that. Instead I think I'll show him how I wrote nice clean code (IMO) before my venture into this OO stuff. Separating code into different pages to be used as cfincludes so the it stays clean and easy managed. Writing stored procedures for most of the queries, again lending itself to cleaner more manageable code.

What are your thoughts? I'll try to keep you all updated on this, it honestly should be fun. I really do like teaching and I think I'm decent at it. I guess the distance thing is what is bothering me now.

Good Day!
Ryan

CFEclipse Bug Fix (cflocation)

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 21:19:21 GMT

If you are like me you don't like any errors in your code, let alone errors that are not really erros at all! Well this was happening to me with CFEclipse until today. You probably all know that CFEclipse has a handy debugging tool built in. If you are missing a required attribute the tag will be highlighted with a red squiggly line. This is very very very handy to have, however the squiggly line seemed to be broken on the tag. When trying to debug the squiggly line the message "URL is Compulsory for cflocation" would appear EVEN IF the URL attribute is populated.

After some searching I found the issue on the CFEclipse trac web site, http://trac.cfeclipse.org/cfeclipse/ticket/1. The trac web site mentioned that the issue had been fixed so I figured I needed a newer version. After downloading the latest version did not work I posted a question on the CFEclipse users list. Lucky for me Teddy Payne happend to be reading the list and produced replied with the following message.

Open up your Eclipse folder

Inside the Eclipse folder is the plguins folder

If you have 1.2.9, then open com.rohanclan.cfml_1.2.9 folder

Open the dictionary folder

If you are validationg for MX 7, then open up cfml7.xml

Do a search for "cflocation"

Each tag has a tag node and each attribute of the tag has a paramater child node

I am willing to bet that your name="url" is name="URL" in upper case. Change it to lower case and the squiggly should disappear.

Teddy

Needless to say the directions above fixed my problem. No more red squiggly lines. I am one happy programmer. Many thanks to Teddy.

Good Day!
Ryan

Vote Now

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 01:17:25 GMT

Don't forget to vote for the CFeMmy over at <cfsilence> . Todd Sharp has taken on the task of tabulating the results. Voting ends on Thursday night so vote today!

Todd's Blog Post
Vote Now!

Good Day!
Ryan

ColdFusion Emmy's??

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 17:18:24 GMT

Heck ya!! Why not??!! A post on today announced the idea. He is now taking nominations for various categories. Go ahead nominate now ! As stated in his blog post if he gets enough intererest voting will take place in a couple weeks.

Good Day!
Ryan

Production Woes

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:02:04 GMT

Our production server at work is down today. Apparenlty 3 blown processors and motherboard issues. Did we work it too hard? Was there an electrical surge? What could cause this? In any rate the users are now on my development box, which is kinda scary. If there is a bright side, it's a holiday week so a lot of people are out of the office.

Good Day!
Ryan

cfcFlexplorer 0.1

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 18:43:32 GMT

Wanna see something really cool? Todd Sharp over at released a project today called cfcFlexplorer. This is a very cool Flex ColdFusion based application used for CFC introspection and testing. According to Todd’s blog post:

With cfcFlexplorer you simply modify an xml file which contains two variables: the server root directory and the directory from which to begin crawling for CFCs. Once the application recurses the directories, it returns all CFCs (except application.cfc's and anything under cfide) into a navigation tree. From there you can navigate through the tree, selecting any component that you would like to see further information on. When a component is selected, the 'methods' grid is populated with all of the methods within that component. When a method is selected, all of the associated parameters for that method are populated into the 'parameters' grid. The parameters grid contains an addional editable column called 'value' which allows you to populate test values and invoke the component. When invoked, the application opens a new window which will dump the results of the call (if applicable). If your component has an init constructor, a checkbox is automatically populated and the init() function is called prior to invoking your component so that any necessary instance data is available to your call. (Note: If your constructor requires parameters, populate those in the param grid prior to calling your function).

Check out Todd’s post for more information or his new project site at RIAForge.

Good Day!
Ryan

P.S. Todd is also getting some good press, check out these posts from Ben Forta and Ray Camden.