One tip that may get overlooked by new developers to ColdFusion is the importance of keeping your DSN names in variables so that they can be changed on the fly. This is actually quite easy, but is best done at the very beginning so not to have to worry about any global find & replace tasks in your Application. The idea behind this is that when the DSN name changes, only one update needs to be made.
While I generally do not like to have any type of debugging turned on in a live production environment, for a few Intranet applications, it’s often useful for me to leave debugging on but hidden away. I do this to be able to look at live production page load times, query run times, etc, whenever I need to.
In March of 2006, Microsoft announced the release of an update to Internet Explorer that would require users to “activate” a ActiveX control before they could use it. Activation could take place by either clicking on the control, or hovering over it and pressing the space bar. This update is only for Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP Service Pack 2. You can be certain that the update will likely apply to new Operating Systems and Internet Explorer versions as they become available.
I wrote this way back when for ColdFusion, so it could probably use some improvement, but it seems to work fine. Feel free to use this in your work. Basically it takes a Tab Delimited File (that you could get, for example, from a CFFILE read) and converts it into an array.
For some reports, I’ve needed to export a query into a Tab Delimited file to be opened by Excel on the users machine. I developed the following to do this, you’re free to use it for anything you like. I wrote it back in my CF5 days and never looked back, so comments on improving are welcome.
Recently I had a problem setting up ColdFusion MX7 Standard Edition on a Windows 2003 with IIS 6.0 box (Sp1) and I thought I’d share my problem and solution.
The CFQUERYPARAM tag is, in my opinion, one of the most underused tags by both beginners and developers who have been using ColdFusion for an extended period of time. Straight from the word of the manufacturer: “Macromedia recommends that you use the cfqueryparam tag within every cfquery tag, to help secure your databases from unauthorized users.” (see this page). So what does CFQUERYPARAM do? There are two huge benefits to CFQUERYPARAM, and I’ll run through them both separately.
One thing that will absolutely help speed up most of your ColdFusion applications is to let your database do what it’s supposed to – the database work! Too often I get so comfortable with just writing out the CFML, that I realize all the work I’m asking CF to do can be done before the data gets back to ColdFusion. Although there are some more advanced and obvious examples, let’s start with a basic one, getting the sum of sales.
Read my review of Mozy here.