ColdFusion Development Blog by Scott Bennett - ColdFusion

CFWindow scrollIntoView

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 03:30:00 -0400

Leon asked:

"I wondered if you know of a way to control the scroll position of the contents in a cfwindow? Do you know if there's some ext api function or property that can be used sort of like the JS scrollIntoView() type function, but applies to the ext window?"

The solution to the problem can be seen in the cfWindowScrollIntoView() function I created below [More]

My 2¢ on Programming Pradigms and Maintainability in ColdFusion

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:18:00 -0400

I hear a lot of OOP fans say that OOP makes large applications "easier to maintain", and the question always comes to mind "Easier for whom?". If I ask "Who will be maintaining my application?", the answer is "ColdFusion developers", and if I ask "Which programming paradigm are ColdFusion developers generally more comfortable with?", I would have to say the answer is "Procedural". Here in the Orange County/Los Angeles area, it's hard enough to find a decent CF developer without limiting my search to the small amount of people that claim to be OO programmers (and some of those aren't even really OO programmers, they just need a job and will say anything). Not to mention that the CF Developers that really do know OOP are often more expensive than their procedural counterparts. I am not an OOP guru, so my opinion may not be firmly planted in reality, but I don't think the size of the application really matters when it comes to deciding weather to develop it in pure OO code or to develop it using procedural code and maybe sprinkling in some OO concepts where it makes sense. [More]

CFGrid: Disable the Right Mouse Click Event

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:39:00 -0400

Willis asked:

"Do you know how to disable or turn off the right mouse click menu for cfgrid?"

This is actually pretty easy, all you need to do is set up a listener on the contextmenu event and have the listener cancel the event. Here is the code (click here to try it): [More]

XMLSearch(): Specify xmlns namespaces in an xPath Search

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:23:00 -0400

At last nights OCCFUG meeting, one of the members asked what is the best way to access the data from nodes in an XML document that have xmlns namespace prefixes. I touched on this topic briefly in the comments of my post about reading XML documents, but I thought I would expound upon it a little more as there doesn't seem to be a lot of solid explanations out there on how to do this in ColdFusion. In a nutshell, the answer is to use XMLSearch() with an xPath expression that utilizes the namespace-uri() function. [More]

PowerPoint from the new Co-Manager of the Orange County CFUG

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:26:00 -0400

As those of you who were at last night's meeting know, I am now the co-manager of OCCFUG. I am pretty excited about this opportunity to help out with some of the administrative things that go into keeping the group going. I love going to the meetings and hope the group continues to grow. Several people asked for the slides from my presentation last night, so I have attached them to this post. (click the download link below)

Orange County CFUG Meeting Tonight

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:36:00 -0400

At the Orange County ColdFusion Users Group (www.occfug.org) meeting tonight, I will be presenting an overview on all the AJAX related features in ColdFusion 8. Then I will be going into detail on some of my favorite features and offer some tips on how to dig into the underlying Ext objects to find the solutions you need when your application requires more customized functionality than the default behaviors that were implemented in CF8. So if you're in the Orange County area, come to Traveland USA tonight at 6:30 pm and join us.

Workaround for CFInput DateField + CFDiv + Internet Explorer Glitch

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:04:00 -0400

A while back I blogged about a div layer positioning glitch that occurs in IE when you position a cfinput datefield above a cflayout or cfdiv generated div layer. This problem seems to be cause by the fact that in IE, a relative positioned element influences the stacking order of it's child-elements, which violates the CSS specification, but who really needs standards anyways right? Well, I figured out a way to workaround it, and it's really stupid that I didn't think of it before. I kept trying (unsuccessfully) to write a JavaScript function that would find the layers and reposition them after the page loaded, when finally a light bulb went on in my head, and I came up with a much simpler solution. [More]

CFWindow as Image onMouseOver Enlarger/Pop Up

Fri, 30 May 2008 19:29:00 -0400

In a comment on a previous post I wrote about Enhancing CFWindow with JavaScript, Ebenezer asked the question:

"CFwindows is quite nice, but i need it to behave in a particular way. I want to remove the frame and the (x) close button. I want to use cfwindow to just "display the bigger size of an image on mouseover and close on mouse out. Anyone with an idea."

Below is an example of how to remove the toolbar and borders from the cfwindow and display the large image when you rollover the thumbnail. [More]

Do I Suck Because I Don't Use Frameworks?

Fri, 23 May 2008 17:38:00 -0400

I would like to begin with the statement that I am not against the use of frameworks, if they work for you, that's great. However, I do get the feeling that there are people out there that think less of programmers that don't use frameworks. Admittedly, there are probably a significant number of ColdFusion programmers out there that don't use frameworks because perhaps they don't grasp the architecture of the framework, or they get scared off by all the big words that framework enthusiasts are so fond of, or they are just never have time to do the research to find out what the frameworks have to offer. [More]

Reposition A CFWindow From Center

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:29:00 -0400

In a comment on a previous post I wrote about Enhancing CFWindow with JavaScript, Nathan asked the question:

"I like the center feature but if you want to move the window to a little below center what function do you call to center then move it down 20 px?"

The answer is to use the Ext.BasicDialog.center() function, then get the windows Ext.Element object using the Ext.BasicDialog.getEl() function. The Ext.Element object has the getX() and getY() methods, which will give you access to the windows X and Y coordinates. You can use those, in combination with the Ext.BasicDialog.moveTo() function, to move the window to your desired position relative to the center. [More]

Google Maps API in a ColdFusion Custom Tag

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:04:00 -0400

At last nights Orange County ColdFusion Users Group meeting (occfug.org) I presented on the topic of integrating the Google Maps API into a ColdFusion application. I made a custom tag for the presentation that generates a Google API powered map, and I am posting it here for all the people that wanted access to the source code. [More]

CFWindow with a Minimize / Maximize button

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:42:00 -0400

Michael Asked:

"Is there any way to add a minimize button to a CFWindow? "

As a matter of fact, the Ext.BasicDialog object that powers the CFWindow tag does have a "collapsible" configuration option. However, Adobe did not add that as an attribute in the CF8 implementation of CFWindow. They currently have it hard-coded so that all CFWindow generated dialogs are set to "collapsible:false". Hopefully they will add a collapsible attribute to the CFWindow tag in some future release, but until then, adding the Minimize/Maximize button onto the CFWindow tool bar is a fairly painless job with the snippet of JavaScript that you can find below. [More]

CFGrid: Disabling the Selected Row HighLighting

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:00:00 -0400

I was working on a project the other day that was using CFGrid to manage some data and there was a button on each row to perform a certain action. However, we didn't want the background color of a row to change when the user clicks on a row or on the button. I created this little javascript that adds a listener to the "beforerowselect" event in the underlying Ext.grid's Row Selection Model and cancels any row selections, preventing the row from being highlighted. [More]

CFWindow Event Listeners

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:47:00 -0400

The CFWindow tag is built using the Ext.BasicDialog object. This object has several public events that you can add listeners to. You can use the Ext.BasicDialog objects on() function to add listeners to these events that will fire a specific function when the specified event occurs. You can program the listener functions to react as necessary to the various events. Here is a list of the events that you can set up listeners for: [More]

Session.cfc

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:52:00 -0400

In a previous post I created a CFC to save simple variables into the session scope. In that CFC I had set up two functions, "SetSessionVar" and "GetSessionVar". However I ended up only needing the "SetSessionVar" function for my example so I never really tested the "GetSessionVar" function. Someone asked me today how to invoke it, and that is when I realized there were a couple little problems that I needed to fix. [More]