Trent Richardson » ColdFusion

AedCFC has Moved

trent — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:18:09 +0000

An old project of mine has moved its documentation to a new home on this website. AedCFC was my first significant open source project, which was a add/edit/delete module for ColdFusion. I would call it CRUD, but its a bit more elegant than that. This tool is meant to be for administrative areas for website administrators, end users if you will. Before the project’s documentation was located on a separate domain, but I moved it a little closer to home. Fact is open source projects that size create very little income, and domain names are getting more expensive everytime they need to be renewed. If you use ColdFusion and often create small to medium size websites for clients, take a look at it.

ColdFusion Snippets for Gedit

trent — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:45:35 +0000

Its rare that anyone uses Gedit for ColdFusion, but hey, I know one that does! First off I use Gedit because its quick, simple, and super extensible. I work in ColdFusion equally as much as PHP as far as the serverside goes, so I like a pretty consistent environment for both, which this editor also provides. Not to mention I work on Linux, OSX, and Windows platforms.

First and foremost, if you’re looking to use Gedit to edit coldfusion you need to add a language file for some syntax highlighting. This isn’t hard at all, just a matter of grabbing the file. Here is a pretty good syntax file for ColdFusion (which I contributed some nice additions). You may also need to add the mimetype file if your system doesn’t already recognize cfm and cfc files.

Now that you are up and running with cfm files, you’re hungry for some snippets. You can get the ColdFusion Snippets on Github. From there you can upload them in the snippet manager or drop them into your ~/gnome2/gedit/snippets directory.

I don’t have all the tags and functions, mostly just tags. It’s really helpful for tags with required options, like cfloop, cfoutput, cfqueryparam which it will do a code completion dropdown with all valid cfsqltype options (cf_sql_varchar, cf_sql_integer, etc..). Its worth taking a look at! Enjoy!

Format Names in ColdFusion

trent — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 11:13:54 +0000

I thought I would share a quick bit of code to format names in ColdFusion. Simply all this does is capitalize the first letter of each name part, taking into consideration elements such as hyphens, apostrophes, roman numerals, and nicknames: William “Bill” Doe or William (Bill) Doe.

The function only takes one parameter, which is the string of the name, and returns the newly formatted string name. As you can see it has a couple loops, which may not be entirely efficient, but it seems to be pretty thorough. Enjoy!

ColdFusion Snippets for Gedit

Remember to Encrypt those CF Cookies

trent — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:48:20 +0000

It seems you can never do enough to protect your website. One pointer I thought I’d mention is to remember to not use the default ColdFusion sessions when possible as they do not encrypt session cookies on the client. You can easily change this in the administrator to use UUID for cftoken cookies under the settings page.

But you can do yourself a bigger favor and use J2EE Sessions just as easily by simply checking the box under the Session Management section. At this point you should now see a new cookie being set by ColdFusion called jsessionid, and it should be a nice encrypted string.

Finally, if you need to hide the other cookies (cfid and cftoken) for whatever purpose for compliances or whatnot(maybe you need PCI compliance) you will need to go into your application.cfc or application.cfm file and change:

this.clientManagement = false
this.setClientCookies = false

You should be able to continue using session as normal and you should only see one cookie generated by ColdFusion, jsessionid. Any other cookies you set yourself will still work properly as well.

This should be on your checklist of things to do for any websites with logins or sensitive data. Also it never hurts to check your non ColdFusion applications as well to make sure they are using encrypted cookie session id’s! Here is a link to a few very quick things you can do to help protect your site: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Configuration

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aedCFC Overhaul!

trent — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:01:31 +0000

For those of you not aware of what aedCFC is, it is a collection of cfc’s which dynamically build end user ready add/edit/delete, ideal for administration areas to websites. You’re asking yourself, “Well a bunch of frameworks build crud for me, why should I bother with this?”. The answer is simple, crud applications are for the developer, aedCFC is for the client. Also this isn’t a content management system, but a tool to very quickly build a very customized cms, specific to your needs, not some blogger’s needs

It’s been quite some time since the last aedCFC update, and quite frankly it is in desparate need of a major overhaul. Well thats exactly what its getting! With more of a MVC approach it will become more versatile and extendable. The new version will improve 10 fold, as now you will be able to easily add custom views, use specific image manipulation libraries(image.cfc, imagemagick, and cf8′s cfimage will be available by default), and several new options. All this is still possible by means of a simple xml model to build the aed. Stay tuned for the upcoming release!

CF_SQL_DECIMAL Rounding

trent — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:27:13 +0000

Unfortunately I had to learn the hard way about the CF_SQL_DECIMAL option of cfqueryparam rounding my decimals off in SQL. I had used it for inserting, then after a while noticed my decimal places were being rounded (3.50 rounds to 4.00) in the database. Come to find out I needed to use CF_SQL_FLOAT instead.

Am I misunderstanding what a decimal is? Does anyone have a good explanation for this? I understand that CF_SQL_FLOAT is the “proper” option, but never thought there was much difference. If nothing else hopefully this helps someone or keeps them from making the same mistake, especially since money can be of type float :)

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jQuery’s ColdFusion Extension – CFJS

admin — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 21:33:13 +0000

Well I’ve been playing with jQuery for a little while now and I really like its “query” like abilities to traverse the DOM. It has probably become my favorite javascript library. But I also discovered another project in the making.. CFJS, by Chris Jordan, a project working to implement many common CF functions using javascript. Not to be misled, many of the functions implemented can be helpful no matter what language you’re use to(like Array functions, List functions and decision functions). The idea behind it is to implement many of the most useful ColdFusion functions to ease the pain of js development.

I found that this really helps out when doing things like form validation. For instance.. I have an email field that I want to validate as an email(could be ssn, or telephone, etc,..). I would use the IsValid(’email’) function check with CF that it is an email address. Well now you would do the same with in javascript with CFJS. Maybe I want to validate a group of checkboxes to make sure there’s atleast two items selected,.. I could check with ListLen() to make sure there are two selected. Again, not to be mislead, you don’t have to be using CF or familiar with CF to use this library(nor do you have to use it with jQuery as there is a version that runs independently).

There’s a lot of potential with the jQuery library as well as the CFJS extension. Developers no longer need to feel like they’re tied down with spry when using JS and CF, there are other great options out there thanks to projects like this!

Database Trees with ColdFusion

admin — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 01:29:13 +0000

I’ve been working for a while on the aedCFC with the optional tree view. This uses an old database technique described on sitepoint.com .. however the tree.cfc I created was very basic as in only adding, deleting, and printing nodes which sortof holds back the possibility to making this a real fun, dynamic cfc with drag and drop for tree nodes(soon to come to the aedCFC). Finally I have added more to this tree functionality by successfully creating a function to move nodes(including child nodes) in the tree.cfc. I dont have any documentation just yet,.. but you can see its pretty straight forward to use. In the download there is an index.cfm which is a small form controller for the treecfc. All of the sql is basic so it is pretty likely it will work on most db’s(tested on mysql and mssql). DB table fields are specified in the comments. Maybe I will get some time to whip up some docs on this little tool.
Download Source

aedCFC 2.1 Finally Arrives!.. with XML Configurations

admin — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 01:45:39 +0000

Finally many of the features we have been working towards made it in the aedCFC. Our long time debated XML config file finally made it in as an option(mainly for backwards compatibility). The biggest downfall to the config before was the function calls with many parameters. I’ve read a few other postings on the great XML config debate and I come to the conclusion that the aed wasnt in the situation where XML would kill it. The XML may slow it down a little,.. but is it enough to really matter?

aedCFC Progress

admin — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 22:45:07 +0000

Ok, so I am happy with the popularity? of the aedCFC we’ve posted on riaforge.org. I am also happy with the progress we’ve made with it over the past few months. Mr. Belcher and I both agree that we need to change the config file some to make the configuration a more clearcut process. I would say faster.. but it only takes about 3-4 minutes to set up a new add/edit/delete with aedCFC. An xml config??
Probably the most remarkable improvement in my opinion is the addition of the ‘tree’ view to allow add/edit/delete of hierarchial structure( menus, subcategories, etc..). Shad has an example on his site. Thoughts?..Anyone?