Dave DuPlantis

Recent Blog Comments By Dave DuPlantis

• Writing My First Unit Tests With MXUnit And ColdFusion

  Posted on Jul 13, 2012 at 12:49 PM

  What I have read with respect to one-test-per-method is that the idea is to give you as much information as possible each time you run the test suite. If you have ten tests within a method, and the first test fails, then you don't know whether or not any of the other nine tests passed, because they ... read more »

• Detecting (And Canceling) Key-Combo Events With jQuery

  Posted on Jul 2, 2012 at 2:58 PM

  This may be covered by what James mentioned, and may not be necessary depending on the audience for your form, but non-keyboard entry, like the Character Map (Win) or Character Viewer (Mac) and the On-Screen Keyboard (Win) or Keyboard Viewer (Mac), may not necessarily generate key events. Internatio... read more »

• Working With Time Zones And Daylight Savings Time (DST) In ColdFusion And Java

  Posted on Jul 2, 2012 at 8:48 AM

  @Brian, That definitely makes it seem like our issues were different. If you were seeing problems in both directions from the database, then it would be more likely that Java was contributing in some way. I've not used Flash forms myself in CF, so I can't comment on those, but it does seem as tho... read more »

• Working With Time Zones And Daylight Savings Time (DST) In ColdFusion And Java

  Posted on Jun 30, 2012 at 12:52 PM

  @Brian, I had a situation that was very much like what you describe above: we had people entering a date in a Flex form, but the date that was being stored was a day prior to the date they had entered. (The effect that caused the bug to be noticed was that the user was trying to set the date to tom... read more »

• Converting Dates Across Time Zones Using ColdFusion And Java

  Posted on Sep 23, 2011 at 3:11 PM

  @Ben, Right ... your example certainly doesn't need it, and people who want to adapt it to what they're using can always look at how it works to see if they might need some kind of locking mechanism. I think this is another one of those things like you've said before: here's one way you can do so... read more »

• Converting Dates Across Time Zones Using ColdFusion And Java

  Posted on Sep 23, 2011 at 1:56 PM

  Thread-safe objects ... hmm ... OK, in this context, an object is like a customer service rep. A thread comes up for service and says hi, I'm January 4, 1998. The CSR says OK, let's see, what's your month ... January ... that's 01. Your date, 4, that's 04. Your year, 1998, yep. Here you go, 01/04/... read more »

• Working With Time Zones And Daylight Savings Time (DST) In ColdFusion And Java

  Posted on Sep 23, 2011 at 9:45 AM

  @David, You are correct about Indiana; see my comment above. Rather than one official time zone and two unofficial ones (Eastern/no DST, Central/DST, Eastern/DST), we're down to two official time zones (Eastern/Central), just like other states split by the boundary. Cases like that make me a big ... read more »

• Working With Time Zones And Daylight Savings Time (DST) In ColdFusion And Java

  Posted on Sep 22, 2011 at 3:15 PM

  @Dustin, You'll need to swap out "parts of Indiana" and replace that with "Hawaii": we started observing DST in 2005, and to my knowledge, Hawaii has never observed it. My first job was with a company that had a significant call center ... but to complicate things, it was in In... read more »

• Parsing CSV Data With An Input Stream And A Finite State Machine

  Posted on Aug 16, 2011 at 2:40 PM

  @Ben, It was a pretty neat tool ... but I suspect there is a catch. In fact, looking at that website, here it is: "NOTE: The SCR toolset is a research product, and should not be viewed as having industrial strength quality. Requests for the software will only be granted to those in U.S. Fede... read more »

• Parsing CSV Data With An Input Stream And A Finite State Machine

  Posted on Aug 16, 2011 at 12:42 PM

  A few years ago, I took a class on requirements engineering, and one of the things they showed us was the SCR Toolset, an application that you can use to do requirements testing ... and as a side effect, you can use it to set up states for your application. (Note that this is self-contained, so from... read more »

• Storing Your ColdFusion Scheduled Tasks In The Database

  Posted on Aug 5, 2011 at 3:31 PM

  @Ben, That's a good observation, so I'll clarify for others who might not have run into that problem ... in the US, when clocks "spring forward" from 2 AM to 3 AM, time on the server will change from 1:59 AM to 3:00 AM - no times in between will "happen". The nice thing about... read more »

• Storing Your ColdFusion Scheduled Tasks In The Database

  Posted on Aug 5, 2011 at 1:05 PM

  At one place I worked, this was pretty much exactly what we used to kick off CF tasks. We could exercise Linux-like control over the tasks themselves and also maintain a nice log of when everything had been run just in case something odd happened. For the vast majority of situations, a setup like ... read more »

• Using MySQL's TO_DAYS() Function To Group Same-Day Events

  Posted on Jul 12, 2011 at 11:58 AM

  @Ben, you're not missing anything ... that was just the result of throwing guesses at the wall to see what would stick. I don't have MySQL on my laptop, so I couldn't test it for sure. Thinking about it, of course no CreateDate function is going to get today's date into MySQL because CF is the one c... read more »

• Using MySQL's TO_DAYS() Function To Group Same-Day Events

  Posted on Jul 12, 2011 at 11:29 AM

  Hmm ... a couple of thoughts about this. Why not use CreateODBCDate( Now() ) to tell MySQL what today's date is? Also, why not just use Date() in your query? Doesn't that return the date part of a date/time value?... read more »

• An Experiment In Using An Embedded Apache Derby Database To Power ColdFusion Query-Of-Queries

  Posted on Jul 8, 2011 at 12:47 PM

  @Randall, how about using it as a datasource for a game? Think of Farmville as a rough example: you don't want to hit the main database every time the player does something, so to speed things up, when the player signs in, you go to the DB server, grab the relevant game data, and copy it to "lo... read more »

• The Sexiest Thing A Woman Can Say In An Elevator

  Posted on Jul 7, 2011 at 11:35 AM

  @Anna, it's always easier to realize what you should have said later. The vast majority of our time at work is spent going back over things that should have been done "correctly" in the first place ... of course socially it'll be the same! I find it's much easier to approach a woman I've s... read more »

• The Sexiest Thing A Woman Can Say In An Elevator

  Posted on Jul 7, 2011 at 10:00 AM

  It seems to me that there are several different questions being asked here. I like Matt's answer to the title of the post - it's difficult to top that unless you go for the super-direct approach, something like "I think the zipper on my skirt is broken, would you check it for me?" Differen... read more »

• ColdFusion Queries Do Not Throw Out-Of-Bounds Errors

  Posted on Jun 22, 2011 at 3:34 PM

  @Anna, I think that's fair to say. :)... read more »

• ColdFusion Queries Do Not Throw Out-Of-Bounds Errors

  Posted on Jun 22, 2011 at 11:06 AM

  @Smita, right, with structs a check is definitely required. (There are workarounds for that, too, but that goes back to the discussion about default values for methods ...) I think it's basically what Ben's saying ... this is something like using if (count) when you know what resolves t... read more »

• ColdFusion Queries Do Not Throw Out-Of-Bounds Errors

  Posted on Jun 22, 2011 at 10:51 AM

  @Smita, what we've done in similar instances is put the query in a struct and search the keys. If you're using CF's ORM or a framework (or both), there will typically be a "cleaner" way to look for a matching object. @Ben, no worries, you've been pretty clear about this type of post bei... read more »