Blog of Shaun McCran - Architecting robust, elegant technical and business solutions - Coldfusion

How I got started in ColdFusion

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:52:00 -0000

I thought Steve Bryant's idea of encouraging the ColdFusion community to write a blog article about how each of us got started with ColdFusion was genius. Here is a link back to Steve's blog. I'd recommend reading it and seeing just how many of us have chipped in with something. http://www.bryantwebconsulting.com/blog/index.cfm/2011/7/20/August-1-2011-is-How-I-Started-ColdFusion-Day. The story of how I got started in ColdFusion is below.... [More]

Handling Error templates in FW/1

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 04:49:00 -0000

I've been using Framework one for a few smaller scale projects, and during a wrap up session I noticed that I didn't have a global catch-all error page, or any kind of error notification subsystem, like an admin email prompt.

This blog article describes how FW/1 looks for and uses an error handling template.

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HostMediaUK site migration complete

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 14:22:00 -0000

I'd been unhappy with my current hosting provider for a while, the performance just wasn't there, and the more I pushed the boundaries of development the more blocks I encountered. Also they were running old versions of ColdFusion and an old JVM which was having an effect on some Java development.

About three months ago I bought a test account with HostmediaUK. I thought I'd venture into Linux based ColdFusion 9 hosting and see how it worked out. I dropped a few test sites onto the platform and discovered a few migration issues around Linux, obvious things to me now, but case sensitive database table names and a totally different file directory system caused me major headaches.

That being said the server performance is great. sites respond well to requests, is easy to manage through the software layer installed on the servers, and when I requested access to the DNS settings it was freely given (albeit with the usual 'here be dragons' warning!).

The customer service is great too, they keep winning awards and I can see why. I've just finished migrating the rest of my site to their platform, it is rare that I recommend a service but I'd point anyone in the direction of HostmediaUK.

JQuery datatable with added FancyBox and auto refresh

Thu, 19 May 2011 22:11:00 -0000

Recently I've had a few questions about how to use the datatables plugin to display data, and also integrate a pop up or lightbox function. The pop up would have an edit form in it, and when the user completes the edit the light box goes away and the datatable refreshes.

This is relatively straightforward to do, but there are several key concepts to getting everything working correctly, so I've broken it down into a few chunks. [More]

Handling CFfile upload 'accept' file type errors

Wed, 11 May 2011 12:24:00 -0000

I was working on a system recently that allowed a user to upload images onto the server. It was restricted to files types of images, more specifically 'jpeg' and 'gif' files.

This is easily done with the 'accept' parameter, as documented in the ColdFusion documentation:

Accept: Limits the MIME types to accept. Comma-delimited list. For example, the following code permits JPEG and Microsoft Word file uploads: accept = "image/jpg, application/msword" The browser uses the file extension to determine file type.

It is important to note here that it is the browser uses the file extension, so renaming an exe to jpg would fool it entirely.

Issues arise when you don't handle an invalid file upload in a friendly manner. In this case when a user tried to upload an incorrect file type they saw a nasty unformatted error message stating that the request could not be processed as the file was the wrong Mime type.

You cannot tell what the file type is until you attempt to upload it, so wrap your cffile tags in a simple try-catch and handle any errors in the same fashion as you normally would, I.E. by handling the system message and instead displaying a nice, user friendly message that doesn't sound like it was written by robots.

Plesk 10.1.1 release adds ColdFusion 9 support

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:41:00 -0000

It seems as though the newest version of the server management software 'Plesk' v 10.1.1 is now officially ColdFusion 9 compatible.

Previously Plesk could only integrate with ColdFusion 8 as it caused instability issues with ColdFusion 9.

There isn't much about this in the release notes, just a simple statement.

ColdFusion 9 support. A new version of the popular site developing tool is available.

The full release notes article is here: http://download1.parallels.com/Plesk/PP10/10.1.1/release-notes/parallels-plesk-panel-10.1.1-for-windows-based-os.html

I'm hoping it works well as I've just commissioned a new server running both these software versions.

Getting Video thumbnails from YouTube

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:45:00 -0000

I want to display an image thumbnail on a page, so that a user can click on it and the video will pop up in a lightbox. But how do I get a thumbnail image of the video I want? This article shows you how you can quickly and easily use a Youtube URL to get video thumbnails.

There is a demo of this here: http://www.mccran.co.uk/examples/youtube-thumbs/

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Daily Dilbert RIAforge project release 1.0

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:52:00 -0000

I'm a great fan of the Dilbert cartoon series, so I've put together a little application to go and get the Daily Dilbert cartoon strip from the Dilbert website. It's a simply cfc call that will get today's Dilbert cartoon and save it to a path the user has defined and passed in as an argument. Let me know if you use it, or think of any ways of to extend it. It is also one of the first tests I was set as a trainee 10+ years ago, so was quite an interesting comparison to write it again. You can download it from RIAforge here: http://dilbert.riaforge.org/

QRcfc released on RIAforge.org

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 23:05:00 -0000

I've released the first version of a ColdFusion QR barcode generator on http://qrcfc.riaforge.org/.

It is a CFC based wrapper for the Google ZXing barcode Java library http://code.google.com/p/zxing/.

There is a demo here: ColdFusion QR barcode generator

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Using ColdFusion to see Java server values

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 19:40:00 -0000

I've been dabbling in more and more Java recently as an accompaniment to my using ColdFusion development, and I've been finding more and more places where they support each other. I rolled out a new Application to a live server (this one) and it failed to launch. This was all down to it running an incompatible JVM. So how do you tell what JVM version your server is running? I don't have direct access to this box, so I needed to do it in code. [More]

The Coldfusion Hash() function decoded - kind of

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 22:29:00 -0000

I've always believed that using the hash() function in ColdFusion is a one way process. If I wanted to reverse a string I had to use encode() and decode(). The Adobe documentation states that "It is not possible to convert the hash result back to the source string" - Adobe Docs for Hash(). Strictly speaking this is still true, but some bright spark has decided to host an MD5 string database and provide a lookup service. [More]

Dynamically adding markers to Google maps

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 19:24:00 -0000

Following on from a previous article I wrote about (Google maps panning the next step in my Google mapping project is to be able to add markers to a Google map dynamically.

This article deals with how to translate a location into a latitude and longitude using Google, and how to send and add markers from a database into a Google maps via a remote service, using AJAX and JSON.

There is a full example of the finished application here: Demo of dynamically adding markers to Google maps

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Filtering a SELECT field using AJAX and JQuery

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 09:51:00 -0000

I've got a select form field, and I want it to change based on a search string that someone enters. Luckily for me the select field is dynamically driven from a database, so the most obvious way for me to do this is to make an AJAX post request using the string entered to amend the SQL query building the field.

This article shows you how to do this, there is a demo of the select field using AJAX here: http://www.mccran.co.uk/examples/jquery_textfilter_selectfield/

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Securing server side Coldfusion code with cfcompile

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 11:46:00 -0000

If you ever need to protect your intellectual property, or you have suspicions that your code maybe be accessed on a server to be tampered with, then your best option is to compile your code base. This article addresses how to use the cfcompile command, and what it actually does to your code base. [More]

JQuery AJAX Http polling example

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 19:05:00 -0000

I've been using the JQuery post() and get() functions for a while now, and thanks to decent Blog entries from other community members I've got my head around the principles of seamless AJAX http requests and response handling.

This article examines a way of creating a polling AJAX http request. This is a request that will run every N seconds based on a value. It will hit a remote service and return a result, and display that result on screen.

View a full demo of an AJAX polling request here.

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