April 2008 Web Log Entries
New ColdFusion CFMailParam "Remove" Attribute Makes Deleting Attachments Simple
Posted: April 30, 2008 at 8:58 AM by Ben Nadel
For anyone who has built a web page that has uploaded and sent files (such as sending resumes to the Human Resources department of a law firm), you probably know that one of the most frustrating things about sending mail from ColdFusion is that the mail doesn't get sent out immediately; it gets spooled. This means that your mail file sits in a dir... read more »
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Creating A "Remember Me" Login System In ColdFusion
Posted: April 29, 2008 at 9:59 AM by Ben Nadel
The other day, I was working on a login system that had a "Remember Me" checkbox where, when checked, the user would be automatically logged back into the system upon subsequent visits to the site. I have built systems like this many times before, but for some reasons, I was hitting a mental road block; I was having trouble wrapping my head around... read more »
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Image Manipulation ColdFusion Wrapper Component
Posted: April 28, 2008 at 8:08 AM by Ben Nadel
Back when Pete Freitag came to talk at the New York ColdFusion User Group , Peter Bell asked if there was a way to treat the ColdFusion image object as a more traditional object and call methods on it like Image.GetWidth() and Image.GetHeight(). Technically, you can do this, but it is not documented and leverages the underlying Java object. O... read more »
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ClearCode Standards Project
Posted: April 25, 2008 at 4:00 PM by Ben Nadel
The ClearCode Standards Project is the development standard that outlines the way in which I code all of my applications. I have talked about my methodology before and since then, it has continued to evolve and become more refined. In this blog post, I intend to keep the most up-to-date outline of the rules and the styles involved. I have chosen... read more »
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Dynamically Evaluating Image Functions In ColdFusion 8
Posted: April 24, 2008 at 3:07 PM by Ben Nadel
I was playing around with some ideas when I came across an odd behavior with ColdFusion's Evaluate() method. Now, let me start by saying that I hate the Evaluate() method with a passion and I cringe at the idea of using it; however, I was doing something that involved dynamic execution of built-in ColdFusion methods and Evaluate() is the only way ... read more »
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Turning On Multiple Statements In ColdFusion 8 MySQL 4/5 Datasource
Posted: April 24, 2008 at 2:31 PM by Ben Nadel
Lately, I have been doing a lot of work in ColdFusion 8 and MySQL 5. One of the things that I noticed immediately was that MySQL didn't seem to allow multiple statements within one CFQuery tag. I read that this is apparently done to prevent SQL injection attacks, which as a ColdFusion developer seems kind of silly. Anyway, it took just a little bi... read more »
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ColdFusion Image Manipulation Functions Return Nothing
Posted: April 24, 2008 at 9:18 AM by Ben Nadel
I have been fooling around with some dynamic image method execution when something I already knew suddenly occurred to me in a different way - ColdFusion image manipulation functions return "Nothing". And, I don't mean that they simply don't return the resultant image object - I mean, just as the documentation states, they return "Nothing" - void.... read more »
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Getting Excited For cf.Objective() 2008
Posted: April 22, 2008 at 3:07 PM by Ben Nadel
cf.Objective() 2008 is almost upon us and I've been so busy with work and with the NYCFUG that I've hardly had time to express my excitement. This is my second ever ColdFusion technology conference, so naturally there is a lot of anticipation; but even more than that, I am really looking forward to the smaller venue. As much as I loved my time... read more »
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Content Is Not Allowed In Prolog - ColdFusion XML And The Byte-Order-Mark (BOM)
Posted: April 22, 2008 at 8:35 AM by Ben Nadel
The other day, Dustin Chesterman asked me about an XML parsing error he was seeing. He was getting the "Content is not allowed in Prolog" XmlParse() error. I have blogged about this error before - it is an exception that is thrown when you try to parse XML that has data or white space prior to the encoding declaration or root node. This is oft... read more »
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No More New Fonts May Be Applied In This Workbook
Posted: April 21, 2008 at 8:48 AM by Ben Nadel
Matthew Abbott raised this issue to me a while back and I just haven't had enough time to look into it. Apparently, with my POI ColdFusion Custom Tags , when you have a Microsoft Excel workbook of any legitimate size, Microsoft Excel throws this error when you open the resultant file: No More New Fonts May Be Applied In This Workbook This goes ... read more »
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You Cannot Submit Non-Rendered Forms
Posted: April 18, 2008 at 8:39 AM by Ben Nadel
The other night, at Rob Gonda's NYCFUG presentation , we were talking about jQuery and AJAX and I wondered if a non-rendered Form element could be submitted. By that, I mean a Form node that existed in memory but was not actually part of the rendered page's document object model (DOM). See this demo if you are not sure what I mean: <!DOCTYP... read more »
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Writing AJAX Return Value Logic On The Server
Posted: April 17, 2008 at 2:35 PM by Ben Nadel
Traditionally, when dealing with AJAX, I have only ever had the server return JSON data or formatted HTML data. Then, in the client, I would take that return value and update the DOM using explicit manipulation. However, last night at the New York ColdFusion User Group , Rob Gonda demonstrated a very interesting idea. I am sure many out there h... read more »
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Rob Gonda Rocks AJAX At The New York City ColdFusion User Group
Posted: April 17, 2008 at 9:15 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, Rob Gonda flew up from Florida to give a presentation on AJAX in ColdFusion applications to the New York City ColdFusion User Group . It was an excellent presentation and one that was particularly useful to me since I am about to start architecting a rather large, AJAX-intensive application. While I have been using AJAX for some time... read more »
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Update To MSSQL To MySQL Translation (II)
Posted: April 17, 2008 at 8:36 AM by Ben Nadel
I have updated my MS SQL to MySQL translation post to include the following functions: Update a table using JOINs - MSSQL Delete from a table using JOINs - MSSQL Creating and populating table variables - MSSQL ... read more »
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Update To MSSQL To MySQL Translation
Posted: April 16, 2008 at 9:33 AM by Ben Nadel
I have started building out my MS SQL to MySQL translation post . I have decided that I am going to tell the whole "story" in MS SQL 2005 before I even try to attempt any of it in MySQL. I feel like this will help me get it done faster - not having to stop all the time to figure out how this is done in MySQL at ever step of the journey. Here is w... read more »
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