June 2008 Web Log Entries
Ask Ben: Streaming Binary Data From The Database (BLOB) To The User Using ColdFusion
Posted: June 30, 2008 at 8:29 AM by Ben Nadel
Hi Ben, I must have searched our old friend Mr. Google and your site for nearly an hour without luck - so I figured I better ASK BEN. I normally retrieve binary object from a database by first writing them to the server's disk and then href-ing to that file. My question is, how do I retrieve a file directly from the database without the intermedia... read more »
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Setting Form EncType Dynamically To Multipart/Form-Data In IE (Internet Explorer)
Posted: June 27, 2008 at 10:07 AM by Ben Nadel
A while back, I posted an AJAX-Style file upload demo . While using that technique in a current project, I discovered a bit of a bug. In FireFox, you can dynamically set the EncType of a form element to be "multipart/form-data" for file uploads; however, this does not work in Internet Explorer (IE). Apparently in IE, you have to set the "encoding... read more »
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Tracking Delta-Only Data Audits In ColdFusion Using XML
Posted: June 27, 2008 at 9:46 AM by Ben Nadel
The other day, I explored the idea of an audit table that copies the entire record in question, creating a full-record snap-shot in time. In the comments to that post, there was some great discussion as to how to create audits and why we might want to do it a certain way. As we mostly agreed on, the type of auditing you do is highly dependent on... read more »
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Tracking Data Audits In ColdFusion
Posted: June 25, 2008 at 9:25 AM by Ben Nadel
When I was sitting in on Steve Nelson's Google Gears presentation at CFUNITED , we started talking about ways to track audits to table data. One of the ideas discussed was to keep an audit table for each table we wish to track. I have never done it this way; I generally used a centralized audit table with an XML diff-field that other tables then ... read more »
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Be Careful Using "#" In ColdFusion DE() Expressions
Posted: June 24, 2008 at 8:01 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, while writing data transfer scripts to move data from an MS Access database into a MySQL database, I came across a problem that I had not faced before. In the Access database, all of the phone extensions where broken out into their own fields. In the new database, there were no phone ext fields so as part of the data translation, the ph... read more »
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CFUNITED 2008 - So Many Great People
Posted: June 23, 2008 at 9:12 AM by Ben Nadel
This weekend, I got back from CFUNITED 2008. As my second experience at CFUNITED, I have to say, it lived up to memory and the glory of the first time. It was a new hotel and a new conference center, so I think there were some things that could be ironed out; but, rather than dwell on the those points of friction, I'd rather concentrate on what ma... read more »
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Katie Maher Rocked My World
Posted: June 19, 2008 at 6:37 AM by Ben Nadel
I am not usually one to blog about a conference while I'm here (as I am usually too busy running around), but this was was just way too cool to keep to myself; yesterday, I ran into the very lovely Katie Maher who was wearing a t-shirt with one of my ColdFusion banner ads on it. Definitely an awesome experience, and I am sure, one of the big hi-li... read more »
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ColdFusion CFQueryParam Varchar-List Puts In Single Quotes For You
Posted: June 17, 2008 at 9:30 AM by Ben Nadel
I love ColdFusion's CFQueryParam tag. I use it in almost all of my queries. One of the CFQueryParam features that I love is the List attribute; the List attribute, which I have blogged about before , allows you to use one CFQueryParam tag to bind a list of values to your query. Most of the time, I use this with a list of IDs: WHERE id IN ( &... read more »
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Inconsistent Stack Height 1 != 0 NULL
Posted: June 17, 2008 at 8:44 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, I got a ColdFusion error that I had never seen before: java.lang.VerifyError (class: cftest212ecfm1626437113, method: runPage signature: ()Ljava/lang/Object;) Inconsistent stack height 1 != 0 null That's certainly an error that sounds really bad. But, after some tag-context debugging, it came down to a silly commenting mistake. I had ... read more »
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Multi-Step Form Demo In ColdFusion
Posted: June 16, 2008 at 9:14 AM by Ben Nadel
I was working on some client work the other day and dealing with a multi-step form process when it occurred to me that I never blogged about this type of thing. And so, I thought I would throw together a quick little multi-step form demo using ColdFusion. Because there are good number of files involved, I thought I would make a little demo video, ... read more »
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Partial Entry For Steve Levithan's Regular Expression Contest
Posted: June 13, 2008 at 9:38 AM by Ben Nadel
Back around Regular Expression Day , RegEx guru Steve Levithan kicked off a little regular expression contest . That contest ends at the close of day today. I have been working on a little something for it, but unfortunately, with my work schedule (I also had a deadline today) I haven't really had time to finish it. It is partially working, ho... read more »
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Ask Ben: Create A New XML Document Based On A Child Node Of An Existing XML Document
Posted: June 12, 2008 at 8:40 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, someone asked me about creating new XML documents. They had an XML packet that came back from a web service call. This XML had some extra information in it that had to do with the web service call itself, not the data that was being transported. As such, they wanted to create a new XML document based on the target XML data, without the ... read more »
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ColdFusion CFCatch Tags Catch Exceptions Based On Type Hierarchy
Posted: June 11, 2008 at 8:25 AM by Ben Nadel
I learned an interesting fact from Brett last night at the New York ColdFusion User Group - ColdFusion's CFThrow / CFCatch combination works in a hierarchical fashion based on the dot-notation of the exception type being thrown. What this means is that as you add "dot-something" to an exception type, it becomes more specific. For example, my blo... read more »
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POI Utility Now Has ColdFusion MX7 Compatible Tags (Thanks Dan Wilson!)
Posted: June 10, 2008 at 9:21 AM by Ben Nadel
I am happy to announce that the newest build of the POI Utility ColdFusion custom tags for creating highly formatted Microsoft Excel documents in ColdFusion now includes a ColdFusion MX7 compatible version. Dan Wilson of nodans.com has taken the existing tab library and retrofitted it to work with ColdFusion MX7. This is now included in a sub-... read more »
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jQuery UI 1.5 Released, Focus On Consistent API And Effects
Posted: June 9, 2008 at 8:17 AM by Ben Nadel
The jQuery team just released UI 1.5 . They took the existing interface and effects library and totally simplified them, reducing the number of exposed method calls by 95%. I have been a big fan of jQuery for a long time, primarily for their amazing selectors, DOM traversal, and simple effects. To be honest, I have not done much with the UI in th... read more »
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