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Dave DuPlantis

Member since Dec 11, 2008

Recent Blog Comments By Dave DuPlantis

  • ColdFusion RandRange() vs. Java Collections Shuffle()

    Posted on Jun 4, 2009 at 5:34 PM

    I know this is old, and you've probably figured this out by now, but for completion's sake (and because I was searching for reasons to use Randomize or not) ... Yes, Randomize() affects RandRange() as well as Rand(). (all this was tested in CF 8.0.1, Standard Edition) Calling Randomize with the... read more »

  • Ask Ben: Maintaining Case Of XML Attributes In Manually Created ColdFusion XML Documents

    Posted on Jan 9, 2009 at 8:29 AM

    I believe this is happening because by default, XML attributes are case-insensitive (like pretty much everything else in CF), and it just happens that CF stores them in uppercase ... so when you need to retrieve them for something that is case-sensitive, you get back CF's interpretation of what you ... read more »

  • Getting the Nth Occurrence Of A Day Of The Week For A Given Month

    Posted on Jan 5, 2009 at 8:45 AM

    As long as we're talking about it ... certainly DST for a global application is a pain, but even within the US there are challenges. Not everyone observes daylight saving time, and sometimes there are changes to that list that are not necessarily in sync with the changes to DST itself. This is why... read more »

  • Getting the Nth Occurrence Of A Day Of The Week For A Given Month

    Posted on Dec 30, 2008 at 3:02 PM

    @Rick: Yes, that. Absent a time constraint, I like poking around at a problem first. It's almost like homework, with the internet being the answers in the back of the book. Of course, while many books are pretty solid, some can have sketchy solutions ... don't be afraid to question something if it ... read more »

  • Project HUGE: The Imaginary Fear Of Scheduling Mundane Tasks Such As Nutritional Intake

    Posted on Dec 29, 2008 at 8:29 AM

    I think scheduling vitamins and stuff like that is perfectly reasonable, particularly when you're in a position where you might not notice that you're forgetting something. I would guess we've all had days where we were so absorbed in work, hobbies, or other things that we completely overlooked some... read more »

  • Getting ColdFusion To Work With MS SQL Server Express 2005 Databases

    Posted on Dec 11, 2008 at 12:39 PM

    @radekg: thanks, I'll keep that in mind. I am still getting artifacts on my main monitor from Photoshop anyway, so it's not like that would be the only issue I'd have ... Also, somewhat to answer my own question, there is a version of Toad for SQL Server. At my last job, we used Toad for Oracle (th... read more »

  • Getting ColdFusion To Work With MS SQL Server Express 2005 Databases

    Posted on Dec 11, 2008 at 11:39 AM

    No Photoshop? That would be a dealbreaker for me, I've got CS4 installed, so I do buttons and things in Photoshop, as well as the occasional fun thing. (Lucky me, it's the Master Collection. Not sure I need the whole thing, but who am I to protest?) I haven't yet run into problems with SSMS 2005, ... read more »

  • Getting ColdFusion To Work With MS SQL Server Express 2005 Databases

    Posted on Dec 10, 2008 at 12:05 PM

    ColdFusion can use SQL Server Authentication to connect to a SQL Server 2005 database (and needs to if you use the provided driver), but it doesn't have to. One of the things the JDBC driver provides is the ability to connect through integrated authentication. If you're headed down that road (as we... read more »

  • Hal Helms On Object Oriented Programming - Day Four

    Posted on Oct 24, 2008 at 8:30 AM

    @Matt: what about natural-gas-powered cars? :) I think these examples touch on the difficulties of properly defining real-world objects ("real-world" meaning both physical objects commonly known to us and programming objects we might have to create at work). After all, a human doesn't have to have ... read more »

  • OOP Getters() And Setters() - A New Programmer's Frustration

    Posted on Oct 14, 2008 at 4:57 PM

    I agree with Rob. Object size (in terms of lines of code, methods, or both) is one way of identifying code that may be more of a problem to maintain in the future - more defects, defects harder to fix - but it doesn't mean you have to refactor the object. Sometimes the solution you need requires a b... read more »

  • Ask Ben: Optimizing Tables For Printing

    Posted on Sep 19, 2008 at 8:04 AM

    @Ray It's true, I could probably fake a page footer by tracking the approximate position on the page and inserting whatever would be necessary to put a div with my "page footer" near the bottom of each page, with a break to follow ... I've done stuff like that in Excel before for similar reasons (l... read more »

  • Ask Ben: Iterating Over An Unknown Number Of Nested Lists

    Posted on Sep 18, 2008 at 8:08 AM

    Very cool. A reader posted a similar question on Ray's blog about a month ago: http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2008/8/20/Ask-a-Jedi-Creating-a-list-of-product-options. That problem was about iterating over a known number of nested lists, so this solution likely would have resolved that is... read more »

  • Ask Ben: Optimizing Tables For Printing

    Posted on Sep 18, 2008 at 7:50 AM

    The problem with that workaround in my case is that I have several fields that are basically memo/text/clob fields, so I can't even be sure how many lines I'm displaying on a "page", and there's one particular section of the report that can be repeated often enough that it might take up more than on... read more »

  • Ask Ben: Optimizing Tables For Printing

    Posted on Sep 15, 2008 at 10:33 AM

    @Ben, I can believe it ... I've run into something similar two or three times already on this project. Usually it's been when my boss asked how a report was coming along, and I showed him in Firefox. We open IE aaaaand it's back to the drawing board. Maybe IE 8 will reach the same level of CSS com... read more »

  • Ask Ben: Optimizing Tables For Printing

    Posted on Sep 15, 2008 at 9:36 AM

    Now if only IE would support these tags properly. (I'm the millionth person to post that sentence - I win!) I'm currently working on migrating a bunch of reports from Access (don't ask) to CF. One of them displays information for a bunch of different vendors, a couple of pages per vendor, and show... read more »

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