A reader of this blog, we will call him Dave, contacted me with the following question.

Looking through your blog I saw one that really interested me. I am getting ready to deploy (I am a contractor) to Afghanistan, and although we work some long hours I was looking at starting a little side project and your "ColdFusion Builder Extension: Form Builder" from 2009 looks really interesting and might give me some direction. We have a lot of forms in our app but a lot of cowboy stuff and now we need to create a mechanism to run this app in a fully disconnected environment so we need to follow some rules in creating our new reports and a form builder might be a good start. Long winded I know, but I was wondering if you ever posted that code anywhere. If not, cool, but if you did I would love to be able to get a copy of it.

First off I am glad someone liked the idea. If you are not quite sure what Dave is talking about you view a quick screencast of this extension here. I never really had time to work on it and what I started with was really just a proof of concept. So I have committed the code to Github and the link is below. I hope Dave or anyone for that matter can make use of this code. This was a long time ago so I apolgoize for the poor written code ;)

https://github.com/cfaddict/Form-Builder-Extension

This entry was posted on June 9, 2011 at 9:05 PM and has received 1526 views. Comments 0 | Print this entry.

I am huge fan of ColdFusion Builder and I love how easy it is to create extensions. I decided today to create the ColdFusion Builder Extensions Development Google Group. This will be a group where we can discuss extension development. The idea to create this group came from the ORM dev group. That group is a great centralized location for ORM specific questions and I can see this group providing the same service. Please sign up for the group today and start asking questions.

ColdFusion Builder Extensions Development Google Group

This entry was posted on May 10, 2010 at 1:16 PM and has received 2036 views. Comments 0 | Print this entry.

You probably already knew that you could supply a description and a license using the configuration file. This is an example of a basic extension. <application> <name>ORM CFC Generator</name> <author>Adobe</author> <version>1.0</version> <email>user@xyz.com</email> <description>ORM CFC code Generator</description> <license>This is my license</license> </application> What you may not know is that you can point to html files for the content. This is really helpful when you have a ton of text for your description or license. Simply create a folder in your extension named install and create an html file. From there you can just specify the name of the file that you are using for either. <application> <name>*****</name> <author>Dan Vega</author> <version>0.1</version> <email>myemail@gmail.com</email> <description>about.html</description> <license>license.html</license> </application>

This entry was posted on March 25, 2010 at 10:34 PM and has received 2203 views. Comments 2 | Print this entry.

I get that not everyone likes to write code the way that I do and at the same time I don't like to write code the way that you do. I have recently come across 2 bugs that I combined into 1 bug because I think they are related.

First we have a basic ORM component here. I have declared this component as persistent using the attribute in the java doc syntax. This is a perfectly acceptable code and ColdFusion will run it just fine. The only problem is when your using builder and your using code insight and type EntityLoad(" you will only get a list of entity's that have persistet = "true" on the component tag. /** * @persistent true * @table PRODUCT * @schema ********* * @output false */ component { property name="productid" type="numeric" ormtype="double" fieldtype="id"; property name="categoryid" type="numeric" ormtype="double" ; property name="name" type="string" ormtype="string" ; property name="qty" type="numeric" ormtype="double" ; }

Just as above you will have the same issues when you are extending your components. In the following component I have ClassB that extends ClassA. When I create a new instance of b and type b. I will only get a list of methods that are in b. If I added extends="ClassA" to the component than the insight would work out great. /** * @output false * @extends ClassA */ component { public ClassB function init(){ return this; } public void function brun(){ } }

Again if you don't like coding this way I completely understand but I think if its valid syntax then it can be considered a bug If builder does not support it. Please help me out and go vote for it even if it is not your cup of tea!
http://cfbugs.adobe.com/bugreport/flexbugui/cfbugtracker/main.html#bugId=81258

This entry was posted on December 19, 2009 at 9:38 AM and has received 2854 views. Comments 1 | Print this entry.

I wanted to put this out there and see if anyone else is experiencing the same issues as me. From what I can tell this should be working in builder but for me it's not. What I am trying to figure out is how to get code insight for a class that extends another one. In this example we have 2 components, class a and class b. ClassA is our concrete component that other components will extend. /** * @output false */ component { public void function arun(){ } } ClassB extends ClassA. /** * @output false * @extends ClassA */ component { public ClassB function init(){ return this; } public void function brun(){ } }

ClassB is extending ClassA and because it does so it has access to the arun method from class a. The only problem is when instantiate class b and go to get a list of methods only the methods in b are listed in the drop down. Is everyone else having the same issue or are you seeing the methods from a. From what I know this is supposed to work so if it's not let me know and I will file a bug.

This entry was posted on December 17, 2009 at 9:52 AM and has received 1797 views. Comments 2 | Print this entry.