Once of the most important things when developing a website is making sure that it is easy for people to find the information they need. Site maps and site searches are probably the most commonly implemented functionalities for making a sites content easily accessible. Whenever I build a site that is more than just a few pages, I usually create a site map that dynamically generates links to every page on the site. Then I use the script below which reads the sitemap and then crawls the whole site and indexes the content into a verity collection to power my search functionality.

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I have blogged a lot about the new AJAX related functionality that comes with CF8, and some of my examples have demonstrated how to utilize the underlying EXT and YUI JavaScript libraries that power these great features. There are 5 functions that ColdFusion provides that give you access to the JavaScript objects, and if you are proficient at JavaScript, I highly recommend you spend some time researching each of the libraries so you can be familiar with how you can customize them to your needs.

If your not familiar with JavaScript, get familiar. More and more attention is being focused on making websites more engaging for users, and knowing how to use javascript to implement AJAX related features is a powerful tool to have at your disposal.

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Yesterday I blogged about how to create a custom date renderer for CFGrid. Today I am going to add to that example how to validate the data entered into the CFGrid before it is sent to the cfc to update the database. The CFGrid (Ext.grid.EditorGrid) object has an event called "validateedit", which fires after a cell is edited, but before the value is set in the record. We will be adding a listener to that event that will validate the data that is being submitted and, if the data is not valid, display an alert message and cancel the changes.

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One of the coolest things about the ColdFusion 8 implementation of the CFGrid tag is that you can do a lot of customization, if you know your way around the Ext objects. I have found several blog entries about using custom renderers with the CFGrid tag. However, could not find a working example of one for date fields, so I decided to build one.

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As of ColdFusion MX, there are several tags and functions that make working with XML a snap. In this tutorial I am going to demonstrate how to use these tools to generate an XML document.

The first step is to write a query to get the data we want to export. We are going to export a list of books from the cfbookclub database that comes with ColdFusion.

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I submitted my last blog entry to www.learncf.com and it got published last night. There not too many tutorials on there yet, but as more tutorials are posted, I think it could become a great resource for developers. I plan on continuing to submit tutorials as I have time.

There are many, many uses for XML, and if you use ColdFusion to consume web services, or create data integration processes, then chances are, you will need work with XML. As of ColdFusion MX there are several tags and functions that make working with XML a snap. In this tutorial I am going to focus on teaching you how to pull the information you need out of XML documents.

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You definitely need your /CFIDE/Scripts directory working properly as of CF8. In previous versions, if you weren't using CFFORM then you really didn't need the /CFIDE/Scripts directory, and many people don't have their virtual directories set up properly and don't even notice. Many shared hosting providers will actually disable the /CFIDE virtual directory as a security precaution (I can't even begin to count how many times I have answered the "Why doesn't my CFForm work?" question on various ColdFusion related forums).

In previous versions of ColdFusion the directory contains 2 files cfform.js and wddx.js. As of ColdFusion 8, the directory contains 1,887 files and 250 folders, and all the AJAX related functionalities require the folder to be accessible.

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So I was using the cflayout tag to create a tab navigation system for reporting module. Each tab had a different report based on live data. The problem is that if you are on any tab that is not the default tab and you click refresh or press the F5 key to reload the data, then you get sent back to the default tab.

I needed to find a way to make it so that whenever a user clicked on a tab, their selected tab was saved in the session scope so that if they happen to use their browsers refresh links instead of using the refresh links I provided for them, they didn't loose which tab they were on.

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So I was reading through the list of ColdFusion 8 AJAX JavaScript Functions, and I noticed that Adobe actually built in the JavaScript Version of CFDump that I blogged about recently.

If you enable the ajax debugging and browse to your page with "cfdebug" as a url parameter, then you can use the ColdFusion.Log.dump() function to dump the object you are working with into the cfdebug log window. Of course, it still has the same problem with recursion on large objects

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