Andrew's Personal Blog

Interesting bug with Application.cfc and mappings and the Application constructor

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:05:23 -0600

A few years ago I wrote a small component for ColdBox that actually allowed me to modify the Application settings, specifically the ORM settings and cfclocation. There was nothing special to this component and I had it working for sometime, that was until I moved ColdBox away from the root of the application and used per application mappings instead.

Which is when I discovered something very interesting with Application.cfc and the constructor.

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ColdBox and changing content headers in script

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:42:18 -0600

Recently I needed the ability to set response headers in script, previously I had just used the layout to use the tag version. Now although it isn't anything new and we have been able to do this in ColdFusion since the days ColdFusion was written in Java, if not earlier, I thought I would share what I was trying to achieve and provide a better insight to the possibilities.

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update to using tool tips in CFgrid

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:08:00 -0600

In a previous post that I wrote on this, which can be found at http://www.andyscott.id.au/2009/7/21/Have-you-ever-wanted-to-use-tooltips-in-cfgrid, I showed how to add tool tips to the CFgrid.

A user wanted to know how to get the information from the cell, and although you can see how he did it in the comments, I will not recommend doing it this way. The reason being is that in the future, you may start to apply formatting to the cell. Which would then make the method this user used, obsolete, but more importantly broken and looking at fixing the code.

So what is the best way to achieve what he wanted?

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Off Shore development, is it really worth the savings?

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:30:00 -0600

A little while ago I had watched a program that reflected the change towards outsourcing, and how sites like www.freelancer.com.au and www.freelancer.com are becoming increasingly ever so popular. It got me thinking that the industry that I grew up in, and love so much, just might be over charging our clients.

I had then come across another article that shifted my views, and had got me believing back to what I had always thought. It does cost us a lot of time and effort as professionals to keep up with the likes of Search Engine Optimisation, marketing a website and the technology that we use to deliver the best results for our clients.

Now when I started to see the shift by this television programme, that our potential clients and / or customers are taking, it was like can we as a professional really compete with this type of trend for cheaper development?

On the surface one would think no. And in reality you probably shouldn't either.

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Should you use pure CF-ORM or a mixture of CF-ORM and SQL

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:59:08 -0600

I have been meaning to write this up for some time now, and haven't had the time to do so. One of the things that I found when learning CF-ORM for the first time, was it was very over whelming to say the least and a lot of questions would come from trying to use it.

Now 2 years down the track and I can say that there are times to use it and times not to use it, and it all boils down to whether you want the application to be scalable or you just don't care, because you know the amount of traffic will never get that high to matter.

Either way I want to touch on some things that I did discover, where I quickly changed my thinking as I went along.

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Deleting Duplicate rows the smart way using OVER PARTITION in MS SQL Part II

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:49:00 -0600

In my previous blog on this I made it very simple where all the data was a duplicate, someone pinged me and asked well that is well and good. But what if there is duplicate records, with only partial duplicate records.

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Deleting Duplicate rows the smart way using OVER PARTITION in MS SQL

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:13:22 -0600

A little while ago I had read an interesting blog about deleting duplicate records by Kumar Shah, now he used CTE to do his magic or Common Table Expressions, but failed to understand or deliver the real magic. As you can see by the comments on his blog, others don't seem to fully understand this magic either.

The other thing to point out before I go into depth, I started using CTE's a lot more and the OVER PARTITION and have to say it is really a great thing that has been added to MS SQL 2005.

So why is so great?

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Setting up and using Resource bundles in ColdBox

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 08:08:22 -0600

I was asked the other day for some examples on using resource bundles inside ColdBox, and even though it is rather easy to use and setup, I thought I would do a very quick post on how easy it is.

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ColdBox 3.0+ and sending emails whether in production or development.

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:03:09 -0600

As this question comes up a lot, I thought I would blog about this some more. ColdBox is brilliant when it comes to doing things by convention, and minimising our work, and emails is no different. However one of the main problems that comes up a lot is how to send emails to developers, rather than to the real recipient of the email while in development.

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Windows 8 Preview and first impressions

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:05:17 -0600

Well what can one say, it is very obvious that this release is geared to tablets and touch screens. So desktop users might be very overwhelmed to begin with, but could these users really get used to this new design and way of life for Windows.

The first thing that the user is presented with is a typical non window interface, that looks like it will be removing the windows from the product name. And the start menu seems to now be the real focus of the Operating System, rather than the desktop now.

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Web Forms hang when working on local machine, AVG Anti Virus to blame

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 02:12:40 -0600

Having the time to finally sit down and seriously look into a problem I had noticed, I was able to eventually find that the problem was not what I thought it was.

For sometime now I had been noticing an ever increasing amount of forms, hanging on any website that I was working on locally. At first I had thought that the problem was with the website and began placing logging information around every line of code on the forms, only to find nothing being logged.

So as all the sites I work on are now ColdBox related sites, I had noticed that none if its logs when switched on had been occurring either, weird to say the least.

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ColdFusion and Remote Calls and notifying the caller of the problem

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 14:52:00 -0600

I want to touch on a subject that I know that not many people actually take into consideration, and that is how to deal with errors and other problems on the server when being called by a remote client call.

I am going to state that I am defining any call made as either a web service, remote procedure call, rest calls that is either from a client like a JavaScript call or even Flash, Flex or anything else.

So how do we handle them, should we report them to the caller or should we just log the call somehow on the server.

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ColdFusion 9 ORM bug with composite keys how did this get missed

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 07:18:53 -0600

Well I have spent a good 2 days trying to work this problem out, to only find that this is not a problem with code that I am writing. It turns out that this applies to both legacy and new databases, and for the life of me I can not understand why this is a problem in ColdFusion itself.

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Problem with ColdFusion Builder 2 as a plugin to 64Bit Eclipse

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 08:31:00 -0600

Well I ran into an interesting problem with ColdFusion Builder 2, and the file view just not working. At first I thought it might have been the version of Eclipse called Indigo or better know as Eclipse 3.7, as it turns out it is ColdFusion Builder at fault.

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Tip using ColdFusion query in cfscript and something to watch out for

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 06:40:00 -0600

I have been meaning to blog about this for awhile now, and thought that now is as good as time as any.

While having a conversation with another developer I had noticed that he had been using ColdFusion 9, and that he had some components that were still tag based, especially when dealing with cfqueries. He would switch between cfscript and tag based code only when he was doing any form of queries against the database.

And when I asked about why he might no be using another method he wasn't aware that you could do this, and I thought it would be a great idea to let others know about it.

However this is also one small pitfall that has and keeps tripping me up.

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