RSS feed for InstantSpot site Sam Farmer's ColdFusion Blog

Cool New cfGrid Tricks

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:59:00 GMT

The html format of cfgrid has some cool new tricks in ColdFusion 9. First the placement of a column can be moved by dragging it elsewhere in the grid. In the example below the 'aDate' column is moved:

Second, when you hover over a column and click on the menu drop down the following options appear which allow for sorting or removing a column (that can then be added back).

You may notice in this example that the sort options are greyed out. This is because, for some reason, sort is disabled by default on Boolean type columns. CF Mitrah found a simple solution for enabling sort posted in the comments of an entry on the four new data types.

I've rarely used cfgrid over the years but in ColdFusion 9 it starts to feel like its ready for the big leagues in part thanks to the new data types, the addition of grouping and inserting (see Akbarsait's blog entry for more) and being based on the impressive Ext JS 3.0 release.

Exploring ColdFusion 9: The Four New Data Types in CFGrid

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:44:00 GMT

ColdFusion 9 brings four new data types to the html cfgrid. As the docs state:

ColdFusion 9: Added boolean, date, numeric, and string_noCase to the
 type attribute values supported in HTML grids

Lets take a look at these new types. Here's a sample query from the art table that I added a date to and called it, well, aDate:

I'll display these using the following cfgridcolumn tags:

<cfgridcolumn name="artname" type="string_noCase"> <cfgridcolumn name="isSold" type="boolean"> <cfgridcolumn name="price" type="numeric"> <cfgridcolumn name="aDate" type="date">

Whats cool is that ColdFusion or ExtJS (I'm not sure which) is going to automatically try and convert these types from the data where possible. The grid looks like this:

A quick run through of the various types;

string_noCase specifies that the column will be sorted without regards to case.
The boolean type will show a checkbox, checked if the boolean is true. From this example you can see that it is smart enough to convert 0 and 1's into Boolean as well as true and false.
The price column is set to numeric which limits the editing of the column to just numbers.
Leaving the best for last is the date type which when editing displays a nice calendar option.

Overall some pretty cool additions that make the cfgrid tag more useful.

Here's the full code to generate the above:

<cfquery name="getArt" datasource="cfartgallery"> select ARTID, ARTNAME, DESCRIPTION, ISSOLD, PRICE, CURRENT_DATE aDate  from ART  </cfquery> <cfdump var="#getArt#" top="10">  <cfform> <cfgrid format="html" name="art" query="getArt" align="left" selectmode="edit">  <cfgridcolumn name="artname" type="string_noCase">  <cfgridcolumn name="isSold" type="boolean">  <cfgridcolumn name="price" type="numeric">  <cfgridcolumn name="aDate" type="date"> </cfgrid> </cfform>

Moving Jobs

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:35:00 GMT

Today is my last day at Interfolio and ends an overall very happy chapter in my career. I have become a better programmer, learnt an awlful lot and had many great experiences. I leave behind a very talented technical team (Dominic O'Connor, Jon Dowdle and Rachel Lehman) who I'm confident will continue to turn out cool new product enhancements.

I am moving on to become a consultant at WebFirst working at the Federal Labor Relations Authority. Its an exciting opportunity working with ColdFusion 9 and Flex. The former I can't wait to really sink my teeth into while the later I've been wanting to learn for years so am looking forward to getting the chance.

ColdFusion One Liners Presentation at CFinNC Slides Posted

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:24:00 GMT

The slides and code from my ColdFusion One Liners presentation at CFinNC are now up on SlideSix.

View the presentation on SlideSix

I enjoyed giving the presentation and if you have any questions let me know.

Adobe Listens: Feedback Shows up in ColdFusion 9

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:50:00 GMT

Around two years, just after the successful launch of ColdFusion 8, I emailed some of the top dogs on the Adobe ColdFusion team about features for ColdFusion 9. These where my suggestions and whether they made CF9:

An IDE. ColdFusion Builder is here and one I've been happily using exclusively since its release.
Shorter Syntax/Full cfscript Support. The shorter syntax was an idea of mine to merge scripting in a tagging syntax. Looking back I'm not sure exactly how it would have worked but I am happy to see much improved support for cfscript. Writing a cfc in script syntax feels good and should help those picking up ColdFusion.
cfspreadsheet. Adobe nailed this one with the new tag and numerous Spreadsheet* functions.
cfaudio/cfvideo. My request was for recording and editing Flash movies and possibly other formats. A little disapointed although these features are availible with other tools in the Adobe arsenal. cfmediaplayer is a useful addition to ease the playing of Flash movies.
Built in ORM support. The hibernate integration appears to be awesome so far.
Stronger support for {} and []: Happy to see more uses for these useful short cuts.
Optomize PDFs: Actually asked for this one later on but am delighted to see its inclusion.

The ColdFusion team did not listen just to me of course, from conversations I've had with them they listen to just about every blog post, review all ERs sent in and go out and talk to customers about their vision. I've participated in the latter and they are very good sessions.

Overall I'm excited with the new features in ColdFusion 9 and pleased that my feedback was listened to (and mostly showed up in the final release) but I'm actually more excited about the features I did not suggest such as:

Advanced Caching
SharePoint Integration
Office Integration (including document to pdf conversion)
Java Portal Integration
Enhancements to Components
Integration with the Solr search engine
Faster Flash Remoting
ColdFusion as a Service

Congratulations to the whole ColdFusion team and all of those who have worked on the release of 9!

Speaking at CF in NC...Come Along and Enter to Win a Flip CF Dude Camera

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:36:00 GMT

I am delighted to have been chosen to present at the CF in NC conference in October on the topic of "One Liners in ColdFusion". Its a topic I enjoy, one that I've blogged about and one that Joe Rinehart mentioned in his excellent keynote on day two of CFUnited.

The session line up at CF in NC conference is very exciting and if you can make it I suggest coming along. There is even a chance to win a CF Dude Flip Video Camera.

Use cfajaximport to help with CF8 to CF9 migration

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:14:00 GMT

This came up in Raymond Camden's CFUnited presentation this morning and he suggested I blog it so here it is.

Problem:

You have extended the cfajax tags by calling the extJS functionality directly. CF8 uses extJS 1.1 whereas CF9 is going to use extJS 3.0. There will be cases it appears where this will break your code as some features have changed from the 1.1 to 3.0 release.

Solution:

Copy the needed JavaScript files (from /cfide/scripts/ajax/*) to another folder in the webroot (say /cfExtJS11/ajax/) and make sure you keep the folder structure.
On the top of any pages where you the cfajax tags use the cfajaximport tag:

<cfajaximport scriptSrc="/cfExtJS11">

(Edit 10/14: I made a minor change to item 1 for clarification)

Ten ColdFusion 9 One-Liners

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:50:00 GMT

All great performers have repertoire of one-liners. ColdFusion is no different and here are some cool new ColdFusion 9 one-liners:

1. Take a Word document and convert it to PDF
<cfdocument format="pdf" srcfile="/mydoc.docx" filename="mydoc.pdf" />

2. Take a PDF and optimize it (remove extra images, bookmarks, etc that are not needed)
<cfpdf action="optimize" source="bigpdf.pdf" algo="Bicubic" destination="smallpdf.pdf">

3. Get an object/record of an artist based on the key
<cfset artist = entityLoad('artists',1,true)>

(Change it <cfset artist.setLastName('McCoy')>)

4. Save the object back to the database
<cfset entitySave(artist)>

5. Add a map to a page
<cfmap centeraddress="275 Grove Street Newton, MA 02466" zoomlevel="8" type="hybrid" />

6. Connect to an imap server
<cfimap action="open" server="imap.googlemail.com" username="" secure="yes" port="993" password="" connection="gmail">

7. Add a message box
<cfmessagebox type="prompt" name="mes" message="Enter Message" labelok="Send" multiline="true" width="400" />

8. Add a media player to a Flash video file
<cfmediaplayer source="/phone.flv" >

9. Put a query into a spreadsheet
<cfspreadsheet action="write" filename="test.xls" query="getArtists">

10. Create a multiple file upload UI
<cffileupload url="multiUploadProcess.cfm">

Ah, what the heck, here's a bonus one:

11. Process those files and save to the file system
<cffile action="uploadall" destination="#getTempDirectory()#">

Pretty cool stuff. All of these new features have a lot of other attributes and possibilities for customization.

There are even a few (creating a progress bar, converting a PowerPoint presentation) that I left off.

Adding CVS to ColdFusion Builder Standalone

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:28:00 GMT

Here's how to add the Eclipse CVS client to the ColdFusion Builder standalone version:

1. From the menu click on 'Help' then 'Software Updates' and select 'Find & Install...'

2. Select 'Search for New Features to Install' and click 'Next'

3. Click on 'New Remote Site'

4. Enter a Name and the following URL 'http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.4' and click 'Next'

5. If prompted select a mirror and wait till the next screen shows up:

Make sure to select the CVS options as selected above.

6. Click 'Next', agree to any licenses and 'Feature Verification'

7. When complete you will be prompted to Restart the CF Builder.

When using beta software I generally like to have it run in its own install. This has worked great for ColdFusion Builder especially once I got the CVS client installed.

Submitting a cfform inside a cfdiv to a new page

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:02:00 GMT

A form created with cfform inside a cfdiv will submit via AJAX and have the response placed in the div created by the cfdiv.

Its possible, with a little JavaScript and HTML, to have the form submit to a new page and to use the cfform validation if needed. First lets look at the main page:

<cfajaximport tags="cfform"> <h2>My Page</h2> <cfdiv bind="url:theForm.cfm">

Not doing much here other than setting up a very basic page with a cfdiv that will get the source from theForm.cfm. Lets now look at that page:

<cfform method="post" action="theDestination.cfm" id="divForm" name="divForm">  Team: <cfinput type="date" name="team" id="team" required="true" message="Please enter your team">  <br>  <cfinput type="submit" name="sub" id="sub" value="Submit Via AJAX"><br>  <input type="button"    onclick="if (_CF_checkdivForm(this.form)) {document.divForm.submit();}"    value="Submit the to a New Page"> </cfform>

A standard cfform example that uses some validation (I researched this topic because the form I was using had extensive use of the datefield type of cfinput). Clicking on the Submit button will submit the form via AJAX and display the results (I've listed theDestination.cfm below).

Clicking on 'Submit to a New Page' button (and its a standard html button) will, if the form passes validation, submit to a new page. If it fails validation and the user had not entered a team that message via an alert will be displayed. Lets take a look at the JavaScript inside the onClick:

if (_CF_checkdivForm(this.form)) {document.divForm.submit();}

The function inside the if statement is written by ColdFusion and is there for all cfform produced forms. The name of this function is simply _CF_check and the value placed in the id attribute for cfform. That function will return true or false and if true we tell the browser to submit the form.

For reference here is the coe for theDestination.cfm:

<cfdump var="#form#">

Should Ben Forta Twitter? What the Stats Say Plus my Quick Review of Twitter

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:50:00 GMT

[UPDATE] Ben Forta now has a Twitter account [/UPDATE]

The other day Ben Forta posted an entry about Twitter and mentioned that he was not a user as he "didn't get the whole Twitter thing". Fair enough.

I found this interesting because Twitter is essentially "micro-blogging" and Ben's blog is a mixture of short "micro-blogging" posts generally annoucing news and longer posts that often go in to great detail. So I decided to find out how many of Ben's entries would qualify for the 140 character twitter maximum. This proved to be rather easy:

<cffeed action="read" query="getBen" source="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/BenForta">  <cfset twitterOk = 0>   <cfloop query="getBen">  <cfset body = ReReplaceNoCase( getBen.content, "<(.|\n)*?>", "", "all" )>  <cfif len(body) lte 140>   <cfset twitterOk++>  </cfif> </cfloop>  <cfoutput><h2>#twitterOk# of #getBen.recordCount#</h2></cfoutput>

3 of Ben's last 15 entries, stripped of html, would have been ok for Twitter. Maybe its time for Twitter, Ben?

My Thoughts on Twitter

I joined Twitter last summer and have found it to be at times fun, a useful way to find interesteing articles and a good way to do some online networking. I generally follow other technology people and overall have a positive experience of it. Check out my Twitter profile.

Kill That Thread!

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 03:50:00 GMT

Every six months or so we have a thread that will not quit and consumes a lot of resources causing general slowness all round.

Its possible to kill the thread with the following code. Put in your ColdFusion Administrator and the thread name which can be found from Server Monitor.

adminObj = createObject("component","cfide.adminapi.administrator"); adminObj.login([password]);  sMonObj = createObject("component","cfide.adminapi.servermonitoring"); sMonObj.abortRequest("jrpp-100");

CFUnited 09 Venue Mini Review and Vote for My Sessions

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:48:00 GMT

Earlier this year I wrote a detailed venue review for CFUnited 2008 helped by the fact I live two blocks from the Washington convention center. CFUnited 09 will take place at the Lansdowne Resort which is a little over 30 miles from my house, and I've been there only once so I can't give as detailed a review.

I can tell you a few things about it though; its a very nice resort, its isolated so the networking will be great, and the room rate prices are great value (and use a CF powered registration system). Also, if you fly into Dulles its very easy to get to. If you liked the North Bethesda location (home of CFUnited 05-07) then you should like the Landsdowne Resort since its a bigger and slightly fancier version.

I submitted two topics for CFUnited 09:

From Eight to Centaur: New Programming Tips and Techniques
Centaur promises new ways to code ColdFusion applications that represent the biggest changes to the core language since CFMX 6.1. Ideas floated at the CFUNITED 08 Keynote included creating UDFs and CFCs with cfscript, a New keyword, cffinally and cfcontinue, implicit getters and setters. This session will walk through specific examples of new ways of coding and discuss the pros and cons.

If a scheduled task fails in the woods, does it make a noise?
Scheduled Tasks and Event Gateways can provide a vital cog of applications but what happens when they fail? This session will look at the monitoring system in place at Interfolio to keep our systems running smoothly. Previously we used a collection of log file checking and sending emails. The new system wraps tasks around a monitoring register, has a front end dashboard that shows the current status of each task and will has mechanisms to control the frequency of how many text messages or emails to send when problems occur.

Vote for them to be included:
http://cfunited.com/go/survey/166

Come Work With Me!

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:22:00 GMT

If you are looking for a new job or know someone who is then here is your chance to come work with me at Interfolio. Here is the full job description:

Junior to Mid Level Web Developer
Interfolio is a fast growing company looking for a passionate web developer with strong quality assurance skills. Interfolio helps people collect, deliver & showcase their life's work. Our services are built on powerful, elegant software that enables individuals to pursue their academic and professional goals.

We are looking for a developer who is smart and gets things done. We have a great development team who have won awards and spoken at conferences. This is a position with a lot of growth potential and the environment to help you succeed. Our applications are object-oriented and use industry standard frameworks. The software we build plays a vital role in the lives of tens of thousands of users, impacting crucial life decisions. You would be working on an application that uses code generation and talks to other systems via API's.

Interfolio will celebrate its tenth anniversary next year and is growing at a fast pace. Our main office is in downtown DC and we have a very casual work environment -- most of us wear jeans (and shorts in the summer). We are a mixed office in that we use both Macs and Windows machines based on individuals preference. Our applications are built with Adobe ColdFusion 8 with a MySQL database.

Requirements:

2 years experience with one of ColdFusion (preferred), php, perl, ruby, .NET or Java
Understanding of Object-Oriented (OO) development
Good knowledge of SQL with MySQL (preferred), SQLServer or ORACLE
Great command of verbal and written English
Permanent legal right to work in the United States
May require some after business hours work (for deployments, etc)

Benefits:

Work in downtown Washington, DC. Our office scores a 100 on walkscore.com
Competitive salary
Generous health insurance plan
401(k) retirement plan
Work on your choice of OS: Mac or Windows
Training and Conference budget
Paid time off

To apply please send a resume and cover letter to sam@interfolio.com with a subject line of "Developer"

Dualing Monitors

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:35:00 GMT

I have been using dual monitors for coming on eighteen months and love it.

One problem with dual monitors when using OS X is the quality of the second monitor has to be very high for real Mac feel. My primary monitor is the built in iMac monitor, and my original second monitor, which displays Windows just fine, looked like viewing a the Mac OS through a dirty window despite all my efforts to adjust settings and calibrations. With the Apple Cinema Displays ridiculously over priced this was one of those small annoyances.

Recently I upgraded my second monitor to a Dell SP2009W (yeah, I've no idea how they picked such a cool name either). This monitor is awesome. Within about 10 minutes of messing with the settings, including one that put it in Mac mode, and calibrations I have two monitors that show off the beauty of the Mac OS to an equal degree. I can now truly swap back and forth applications that I would n

I also got a 3M adjustable monitor arm that, apart from making the monitor look like it is suspended, can flip the monitor between portrait and landscape modes. And anything in between if you wish to code on angles. I was excited to try coding in portrait mode as it seemed like it would show more code. This is great for browsing a folder structure and working on one file but when a 20" widescreen monitor is turned to portrait it becomes very narrow. The IDE features become very far apart from each other so for now I have gone back to landscape mode. Below are two photos with this setup.

Portrait view...look at all that code!

More "traditional" landscape.

CFUnited Evaluations

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 05:30:00 GMT

CFUnited was the first conference that I spoke at so I was eagerly awaiting the evaluations of my "Creating, Manipulating and Printing" session to see what other people thought.

Fifty-six people returned evaluations, about half the room I believe, and fifty-five of them gave me a score. CFUnited evaluations have four categories (Quality of materials presented, Knowledge of the topic, Amount of materials presented, Presenter's instructional ability) each ranked out of 5 for a total possible score of 20. I got a 17.9 average which I am quite pleased with.

Some of the positive comments:

"smoothest flow of all the presentations"

"sequence of doc creation > review code > show result made the process very clean"

"very good succinct examples/code samples"

"simple real world examples"

"clear, organized, covered what was described"

"quick enough to allow for lots of questions"

"question time"

I finished about 15 minutes early and used the extra time to show off one more example that was not in the slides and then had an extended question and answer time. Lots of good questions and some that I could not answer but that others in the room could.

"everything"

this person then gave me 17/20!

The negative comments/stuff to work on:

"presenter was a little monotone"

"needs humor"

I would agree with both these comments. I had not been sleeping well that week so was a little tired which resulted in a more monotone delivery. I would like to bring more humor into my presentations but did not want to try and do too much the first time out. Definitely something to work on for next time. Have you heard the one about the pdf file, text file and image? No, well come to my next talk...

"more complex examples showing the advanced features"

"would like real world examples"

This session was in the bootcamp level so I did not want to go to advanced but perhaps this is something to add towards the end of the presentation. As for real world examples I created a fake application (the Dundler-Mifflin proposal maker) to try and make the examples as life like as possible. Others commented that they felt the examples where real world so this might just vary from person to person.

"the room temperature"
Most conferences have ridiculously cold rooms. The rooms at CFUnited just seemed cold!

"a bit too fast"
Definitely something to take in mind for next time and especially when giving bootcamp sessions though others seemed to like it.

"please repeat questions for all to hear"
Yes. Will do, I did for some questions but know I dropped the ball on others.

Overall I am quite happy with how it turned out and will be thinking of topics to apply to speak on at next years conferences. Is there anything you would like to hear?

Its a Wrap, CFUnited 08

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:45:00 GMT

CFUnited this year was a fantastic conference, here are some of my thoughts in random order:

Adobe Keynote. Considering this was a non release year the keynote was very exciting from the educational license to the language enhancements to the AIR integration. (In comparison the 06 keynote about Connect integration left many flat.) Others have provided way better summaries, the main thing I took away was the commitment of Adobe to making CF better.
It was great to meet and talk to so many other developers. Both those in the blogsphere, where putting a face to a blog was great, and those without blogs. I had many interesting conversations about programming and other topics as well! It was also a real treat to talk to members of the Adobe CF team (even if my attempts to get them to spill the beans on other new features consistantly failed -- Rupesh you are too sharp for me ;))
Great sessions. I took something out of every session I went to and many where excellent.
The location. The wireless was great, there was enough room in each session that there was no need to reserve spaces ahead of time and enough room to get around. I like the airiness of the convention center. Lunch was good on Wednesday, poor on Thursday and excellent on Friday.
Speaking for the first time. I found this a little more nerve racking in the build up than I was expecting (take the advice and speak to a user group or two first) , still once I got going I really enjoyed it and hopefully those attending my sessions got something out of it.

Many thanks to Liz, Elliott and Nafisa and everyone else at Teratech for all their hard work on CFUnited and I'll see you next year!

CFUnited Presentations Posted: Intro to CFML plus Creating, Manipulating and Printing PDFs

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:39:00 GMT

Here are the presentations and code from my two CFUnited talks. I enjoyed giving the sessions and if you have any questions please let me know.

Creating, Manipulating and Printing PDFs

Presentation (PDF) and Code

Intro to CFML as a language

Presentation (PDF) and Code

cfAjaxProxy and Mach-II

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:22:00 GMT

Here's an easy way to use cfAjaxProxy with a Mach-II application.

First I created a new cfc that extends Application.cfc to gain access to all of the Mach-II features.

Then add a function with access="remote" and list all of the arguments (cfajaxproxy requires all arguments be defined). Next set all the arguments to the form or url scope so that Mach-II can read them. Finally call handleRequest().

<cfcomponent output="false" extends="Application"> <cffunction name="getData" access="remote" output="true" hint="">  <cfargument name="artistID" default="">  <cfargument name="artistName" default="">  <cfset url.event = "user.edit">  <cfset url.artistID = arguments.artistID>  <cfset url.artistName = arguments.artistName>  <cfset handleRequest()> </cffunction> </cfcomponent>

I'm sure there are cleaner ways but this works and allows easy use of the great cfAjaxProxy tag in a Mach-II application.

Saving my Eyes (Cool Mac Trick)

Wed, 14 May 2008 12:47:00 GMT

I have pretty good vision and even as I approach my mid-30's do not need glasses or contact lenses. All is not peachy though -- reading light text on dark backgrounds causes me pain about a paragraph or two into reading an article.

A solution, which a friend recently pointed out to me, is to 'Reverse black and white' as Apple calls it by holding down crtl+option+command+8. As you have probably worked out this switches the black and white and allows me to read entries without my eyes hurting.

I tried taking a screenshot but Apple takes a screenshot of the orginal settings not the reversed.