I know when ColdFusion 9 / Builder will be released

Last night we were lucky enough to have Adam Lehman on the Adobe user group tour present to us on ColdFusion 9 & Flex 4. After the meeting we had some good times as we all headed out to a local pub for some good food, conversation and drinks. After a few beers Adam was spilling his guts and I am glad to announce the release date. Ready for it? come on now I can't let that out of the bag but I can tell you this. It is public knowledge that they will both be released this year. The more I hear Adobe talking about all of there products I have a couple of assumptions. 1st off we know its not going to be anytime soon because public beta's have not been released yet. Second, I really think all of the products they have in beta out there are going to be released at the same time. My best guess is somewhere close to Adobe Max all of the products are going to be released at once.

** Disclaimer, Adam is a rock and told me nothing!

ColdFusion 9 & Flex 4 Tour in Cleveland

On Wednesday, June 17th, join us for what will be the biggest Adobe user group event in Cleveland history! All of the official Adobe groups: The Cleveland ColdFusion User Group, the Cleveland Flex User Group, the Cleveland Adobe User Group and the Cleveland InDesign User Group join forces for this big, big, BIG... SOOOOO BIGGG event that you'll want to be there!

The ColdFusion 9 and Flex 4 tours are here! Adam Lehman of Adobe, who was featured on CFConversations this week, will be our speaker for this event.

If you're in or near the Cleveland area, join us! It's at 6pm, and at the offices of:

Dealer Tire, LLC 3711 Chester Avenue Cleveland, OH 44114

There will be food, beverages, and prizes, along with swag!

If you are planning to attend, it's imperative that you RSVP on the Cleveland CFUG website.

If you're not in the area, check out your user group website for more information about a tour date in your area.

jQuery adds a touch of eazy to admin screen

I really was not sure what to title this post so that's what I came up with. I have a friend who I do work for that has a pretty simple admin screen where he can update properties of an e commerce application I built for him. Recently he asked for an option to change the status of an order. This is fairly common in this type of application but what we did not want to do is present an order list, click on an order to view the details, update the order and then return back to the order screen. We decided it would be best if he could easily change the status right from the orders listing. This article will walk you through a couple things I found while creating this feature, hopefully it helps someone.

First let's look at our new admin screen. Here we have a list of orders and instead of displaying a status we are going to display the status as a pick list with the current status selected, nothing big going on here.

<select id="status-#orderId#" class="_status"> <option value="P" <cfif status EQ "P">selected</cfif>>Processed</option> <option value="D" <cfif status EQ "D">selected</cfif>>Declined</option> <option value="S" <cfif status EQ "S">selected</cfif>>Shipped</option> <option value="C" <cfif status EQ "C">selected</cfif>>Cancelled</option> </select> The thing to pay attention to here is what I am doing with the id of the select box. All status drop downs will have a class of status but the id will be unique for each one. During the output loop we will insert the order id so our status will be status-orderid. This will allow us to know what order is being changed.

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The many ways to list the contents of a directory

Let me start off by saying that this does not just relate to using cfdirectory but really any tag or function that deals with some type of absolute path. I came across this problem at work as we were trying to list the contents of a directory that resides on a remote machine. First let's take a look at the solution if we were trying to do this on our local machine. Here we can either hard code the exact location of the directory or if we know its right below the directory we are working with we can expand the current path. <!--- the absolute path to the directory ---> <cfdirectory action="list" directory="c:\www\abc\images" name="dirlist"/> <!--- the absolute path to the directory without hard coding the location ---> <cfdirectory action="list" directory="#expandPath('.')#\images" name="dirlist"/>

This is fairly straight forward so far because we are dealing with local machine resources. When we start talking about a remote machine we are getting into account privileges on a domain. I am the first to tell you I am not an expert when it comes to server administration so If I explain something wrong call me out on it. In a default ColdFusion installation the service is run under the local system account and that usually will not have any privileges to outside resources. You either need to grant permissions to that account or you need to create a new account that has the necessary permissions. Once you have that done you can start working with outside resources.

Another thing to remember here is that we are working with absolute paths. In our case we had a virtual directory in IIS pointing to a share drive. Even though this is browsable you can not use "/vdname" to list the contents of a directory. You can however use expand path with the virtual directory name to get the path. In the end that will expand out to the UNC path of the directory. Another option you can use the ip address of the machine. As you can see there are many ways to list the contents of a directory. In my case it was a permissions issue so I would always start will full permissions and work your way backwards. <!--- a remote machine using the unc path ---> <cfdirectory action="list" directory="\\uncpath\shared\images" name="dirlist"/> <!--- a virtual directory ---> <cfdirectory action="list" directory="#expandPath('/abcimages')#" name="dirlist"/> <!--- a remote machine using the ip address ---> <cfdirectory action="list" directory="//10.1.1.2/images" name="dirlist"/>

Advanced AJAX Presentation Completed

I just completed my presentation at cfObjective and I am glad I made it through alive. That was really my first conference session so I was a little worried having to talk to so many smart people. I think it ended up going well and I got some real good questions from the people that attended. I have uploaded my presentation to SlideSix for you to check out and I have attached my code. Thanks again for anyone who took the time time to come listen to me rant.

http://www.danvega.org/blog/enclosures/presentation_code.zip

Adobe Livedocs Error

Today I was trying to look something up on Adobe Live docs and I came across an interesting error. I am not posting this error in the wild to point fingers at people because believe me I am far from perfect. I think this is a perfect opportunity to look at a couple of things that might of prevented this error.

Before we get into a solution we need to look at the problem. So as I was browsing the live docs today I saw the following page displayed.


Without more information I can't be sure what's going on here but I can take a stab at it. The first issue is with locking application variables. The reason you want to lock variables is because in a multi threaded environment you can have the chance (albeit slim chance) of 2 threads attempting to do the same thing at one time. I used to see this code all the time (even in my own stuff). <cflock type="exclusive" scope="application" timeout="60"> <cfset application.applicationStarted = now()> </cflock>

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PayPal PayflowPro Integration Update

This is just a quick announcement to anyone how ever worked with or currently is working with the PayflowPro SDK. A customer of mine logged into their PayflowPro manager the other day and was greeted with the following message.

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CFMU is back and better than ever

A while ago I started a project code named CFMU. The name was clearly some of my best work yet because it stood for ColdFusion Multi Uploader. I wanted to be able to quickly add a multiple file uploader in my applications and i wanted to be able to display progress to the user so naturally the Flash platform was a good fit. I had written many uploader components in Flex before so it was a fun little project.

Since the initial release I have got a ton of feedback and most of the issues were related to installation and usage issues. The customization was done via an XML file and quite frankly it did not work as well as I wanted it to. I decided to re write this project so it was easier to use and I think I have come through. I have turned it into a custom tag so all customizations are done by passing tag attributes and I was able pass all of the settings to the application using flash vars.

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A lot of hard work has finally paid off

When 2009 started most people were working on setting those all important personal goals for the year. Let's face it, for most of us If your still following 1 a congratulations is in order. Here at STERIS we were starting the planning phase of what would become the new www.steris.com. If you don't know I was lucky enough to have joined this team back in October of 2008. I happy to announce that over the weekend we were able to launch the new corporate site. There is still plenty of work to do but I would like to walk you through a quick overview of the new compared to the old and give a quick run down of the new features. In the future I will post some more code specific features.

Here are a couple screen shots from the old site with it's counter part from the new site. The first is the home page and the second is the news page which is also an example of an inside page with sub navigation. 

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A Great time to love CFML

It really is a great time to be a CF developer. I would like to take a quick second to remind everyone what is going on these days.

First off in the land of Adobe ColdFusion we are all excited about the upcoming version ColdFusion 9 (or what will be 9!) that will come out sometime this year. Ben Forta announced on his blog today that he will be talking more about ColdFusion 9 later this month at some upcoming presentations. Also, to give myself a quick plug, I will be showing some never seen before new features during my presentation at cfObjective which is right around the corner. With that said If you have not signed up for that conference, you really need to get on that now. Go do that right now and them come back and finish reading this post.

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