Reminder - BFusion and BFlex
Do not forget that registration is open for BFusion & BFlex, a two day conference being held in Bloomington, Indiana on September 6th and 7th. The first day focuses on ColdFusion and the second on Flex. Best of all - you can't beat the price. Free.
But just for my readers I have a special surprise. If you register with the code "JEDI", you get 20% off the registration price. That's right. 20% off. You pay 0.00 instead of 0. That's a great savings and I want to thank Bob Flynn for extending this to my readers!
Eclipse trick
I'm writing some quick code samples for my presentation tonight and accidentally discovered a neat trick in Eclipse. I went to add a new folder for try/catch demos. I named the folder, literally, try/catch. I had meant to do trycatch of course. So what did Eclipse do? It nicely made a try folder with a catch folder underneath:
I wasn't expecting that! While on the topic of file navigation and Eclipse, I also didn't know (until a few months ago) that the Del key works in the Navigator as well. It's a quicker way to delete files.
Now if I could only get it to run my Groovy files with one click instead of two...
Yet another post on cffeed and columnMap
I love to beat up on the cffeed tag. I mean I'm happy it was added to the language, but out of all the features in CF8, this one seemed to be the most flakey. Just look at the blog entries:
CFFEED and Date Values
Ask a Jedi: Handling RSS feeds with custom data
CFFEED Fixes in 8.0.1
Fun little feed parsing issue to watch out for - new lines!
CFFEED Tip - Structure versus Query
Metadata properties for CFFEED
Bug to watch out for with CFFEED
Columnmap Gotcha for CFFEED
Ok, so not all of those entries are complaining, but CFFEED is still my favorite tag to kick around. I ran into another problem this week with a user submitted question. He was using columnMap with CFFEED and kept getting:
Two Presentations Tomorrow
Tomorrow I'll be doing two presentations. The first meeting is CFC 201 for the ColdFusion Online Meetup. This will be at 11AM CST. The Connect URL is http://experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup/. This is basically a tips/tricks/suggestions/etc presentation for components, but I'll be skipping over all (well most) of the syntax stuff.
My next presentation is to the Orange County CFUG and will be at 9PM CST. I'll be talking about error handling in ColdFusion, and touching a bit on the cfqueryparam issue. The Connect URL for that is http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/occfug/.
Ask a Jedi: Creating a list of product options
Andrew asks:
I have an application im programming and am stuck on this one section. I have system for product options. i let the user create different options like this:
Color:green,red,brown
Size:S.M,L,XL,XXLNow I'm able to read each as a list and loop through to get the options and save each to database. I want to now go ahead and create a list of all possible combinations.
s,green
m,green
l,geen
You get the idea. Now each has an ID number so I could use combo numbers like:
1,2
1,3
1,4
Have any how this could be done in coldfusion? I have tried arrays and havent got a solution yet.
360|Flex Recordings posted to AMP (and cool AIR fact)
Ted pinged me earlier today to let me know that the first 5 sessions from 360|Flex are available via AMP (Adobe Media Player). You can find more information at his blog post:
Recording 360|Flex - Free Full Sessions on AMP
You can actually install AMP via the badge on the blog entry. Not only will this install AMP, it will also auto-add the 360|Flex subscription. I didn't know AIR installers could do that. I knew they could handle installing AIR if need be, and of course your application, but being able to tweak settings as well is rather nice.
Be sure to click the badge in the middle of his blog entry. When I clicked the badge on the right, it did not add the content, and no amount of searching would turn the content up.
I've got to say - I have not been a big fan of AMP. I find it clunky and slow, and it just hasn't worked well for me on my Mac. I will say though that content like this is enough to make me get over it though. Then again, the content could have just as easily been pushed to Connect probably.
ColdFusion Ajax Bindings - Form Fields only?
Jose asks:
I just got started using cfdiv an the other AJAX related tags and I have a question about passing params in the bind attribute. I have the following test code:
<cfinput name="EmployeeID" type="hidden" value="#variables.EmployeeID#" />
<cfgrid name="goals" format="html" striperows="yes" bind="cfc:ab.model.goals.goalsGateway.getGoalsGridRecordSet(page={cfgridpage}, pagesize={cfgridpagesize}, gridSortColumn={cfgridsortcolumn}, gridSortDirection={cfgridsortdirection}, EmployeeID={EmployeeID})">
Does it mean I can only pass filter params for the cfcs I am using thru having those hidden "pass thru" fields? What I am missing?
ColdFusion Unconference Update - The Uber Panel
Just a quick note to remind folks about the ColdFusion Unconference coming to MAX 2008. I've filled a few more slots in the last week but I'm still looking for additional speakers.
Oh, and I just now added the Uber Panel on Wednesday at 10:30 AM. This is a panel discussion with some relatively unknown people. I've never heard of Sean Corfield, Charlie Arehart, Joe Rinehart, Adam Lehman, Jason Delmore, and Raymond Camden. But I thought - wouldn't it be interesting to ask a bunch of ColdFusion newbies all kinds of off the wall, extremely difficult, and controversial questions? While you may not know any of these names, I do think it will make for quite an interesting panel.
ColdFusion Ajax Grid - and POST
On another listserv (sorry, can't say where, would have to kill you), a user brought up an interesting problem. He was using CFGRID (the Ajax variety) and had bound it to a CFC. No big deal, right? Well his API was somewhat complex. How complex? His method took 61 different arguments. Now frankly I think that is a bit too much (like Paris Hilton doing political ads too much), but it's what he needs and he wants it to work. The problem he is running into though is the size of the URL. You can probably imagine that a URL with 61 different arguments is going to get a bit long, and at some point, it stops working. The solution is simple. Switch to POST. But how do we do that with cfgrid?
Ask a Jedi: Controlling the size of bars in cfchart
Su asks:
I am trying to use CFCHART to create bar graphs. I need to specifically format them to match to a predefined sized width of bars. Is there a way to control the width of bars produced by the CFchart? Thanks for any help.