How my world has changed (personally)

In April 2012 doctors found a brain tumor in my 7 year old son, and within a 3 days they removed it.  I try to keep my professional career and personal life separate in many ways.  But I believe something this big should cross those boundaries.  This will be my only post, on my technical blog, so feel free to follow my personal blog if you would like to stay in touch.

As of Today, I feel very lucky how the events have turned out, although this trip my family are on hasn't stopped our situation could have been a lot different.

I've been trying to compile the events in my personal blog (www.lonestarbandit.com).

Railo Frameworks within Subfolders - file not found

I use coldbox, and I am just now looking at using Railo with tomcat on Linux.   I have a development machine where I am loading different test cases into a single web root.  For example

/contentBoxTest/
/TestIntranetSite/
/TestPublicSite/

The main handler worked, but all subsequent handler's failed, including modules.

I found out that Railo/Tomcat doesn't have the greatest wildcard processor for handling frameworks with SES.  for example /contentBoxTest/index.cfm/help/me

So I found that for each subfolder that we want the index.cfm to be processed in a SES way, we have to add a line to the configuration file.

For mine, a default install the config file is located at

/opt/railo/tomcat/conf/web.xml

there is a structure within the xml file with within it

mine now looks like this



        GlobalCFMLServlet
        *.cfm
        *.cfml
        *.cfc
       
        /index.cfm/*
        /default.cfm/*
        /post.cfm/*
        /archive.cfm/*
        /blog.cfm/*
        /page.cfm/*
        /rewrite.cfm/*
       
        /TestPublicSite/index.cfm/*
        /TestIntranetSite/index.cfm/*
        /contentBoxTest/index.cfm/*
   

Amazon AWS Railo Setup - A Trial

After looking at ColdFusion hosting providers and the extreme costs and limitations they through at you, I've decided to look at running my own in the Cloud.  Amazon AWS set of features and flexible price structure, including a free first year for development, made the decision easy to investigate first.

I got to say at first I was a little overwhelmed with the naming conventions of AWS products.  But after stumbling and reading some articles, the terminology actually fits.  Once I got a machine running (Ubuntu 32bit), which was really easy with the "launcher" wizard AWS (EC2) provides), the challenge of connecting became very obvious.  I have used SSH in the past, I have always used it with a password.  AWS by default does NOT allow this, key pairs are required.  Again after a couple quick searches, I found Putty was the easiest.  I wish I had the main page I used, but I can't find it in my browser history.  Anyways, you take the PEM file given to you from Amazon (you can only download it once, so make sure you back it up).  And have PUTTY convert it to a putty file.  Once there, use putty to connect to the host name with the Key Pair file.

Now once you are connected, there is no UI, so linux command knowledge is required.  You don't have to be an expert, but knowing the basics help!

I used Nicholas Tunney blog post http://blog.nictunney.com/2012/03/railo-tomcat-and-apache-on-amazon-ec2.html to install and configure Railo, Tomcat, and Apache2.  The only commands he doesn't have in his blog is the change permissions command.

chown -R railo /var/www

and the restarting of the services apache2 and railo

sudo services apache2 restart
sudo /opt/railo/railo_ctl restart

I now have Railo setup on this server.  My next steps will be setting MySQL and getting Coldbox and ContentBox running on this server.

Creating an environment safe wrapper for cfmail

The one thing that always makes me nervous when testing other people's code, is who is this going to email? Well many years back I created a cf_email custom tag that wrapped cfmail with some special if logic before it to determine if it was in production or different environment. The logic for is easy

comparenoCase(server.serverLevel,"PRODUCTION") EQ 0

and there was another script that got included in the application.cfm file "server.cfm" that loaded the server variables.
But the issue I ran into lately, was I needed to use one of the newer features within cfmail that wasn't hard coded into my wrapper. So knowing that coldfusion added the support to attributeCollection=attributes and seeing the Ray Camden had a nice blog post on CFASSOCIATE. I asked one of my co-workers to work on it :-D But anyways, we came up with the below code.

The below code allows the same features within coldfusion to be used for within the customTag, but now we can add additional logic to verify environment and only send the program's email in production, and tweak the TO,CC,BCC fields if not within production.
Test Code

<cf_email to="endUser@cfhero.com" from="help@cfhero.com" subject="This is only a test">

    <cf_emailparam file="#expandPath("./web.jpg")#" disposition="inline" contentID="image1">
 
    There should be an image here <img src="cid:image1" />

</cf_email>

cf_email

<cfif CompareNoCase(thisTag.hasEndtag,"NO") EQ 0>
 <cfthrow message="cf_email requires end tag" />
</cfif>

<cfparam name="attributes.from">
<cfparam name="attributes.to">
<cfparam name="attributes.subject">


<cfif CompareNoCase(thisTag.executionMode,"END") EQ 0 >

<!--- add customization here for non-production use --->
 
<!--- blank the generated content out and move it into a variable --->
<cfset variables.GeneratedContent = thisTag.GeneratedContent>
<cfset thisTag.generatedContent = "">
 
<cfmail attributecollection="#attributes#" from="#attributes.from#" subject="#attributes.subject#" to="#attributes.to#">
 <cfif isDefined("thisTag.emailParam")>
  <cfloop array="#thisTag.emailParam#" index="attrCol">
   <cfmailparam attributecollection="#attrCol#" >
  </cfloop> 
 </cfif>
#variables.GeneratedContent#
</cfmail>
</cfif>

cf_emailParam

<cfif CompareNoCase(thisTag.hasEndtag,"YES") EQ 0 AND CompareNoCase(thisTag.executionMode,"END") EQ 0 >
 <cfexit method="exittag" />
</cfif>

<cfassociate basetag="cf_email" datacollection="emailParam">

Null Values within SQL Select Statement with CFQUERYPARAM

I was working on code where I wanted to store nulls into the database and query based on those nulls.

<cfquery name="qRetrieve" datasource="#getDSN().getName()#">
 select semesterID,Major_ID,Campus_ID,AdmTypeReqID,startDate,startOrEndFlag
 from isFull
 where 
  semesterID = <cfqueryparam value="#arguments.DTO.getsemesterID()#" cfsqltype="CF_SQL_INTEGER">
  AND Campus_ID = <cfqueryparam value="#arguments.DTO.getCampus_ID()#" cfsqltype="CF_SQL_INTEGER">
  AND startOrEndFlag = <cfqueryparam value="#arguments.DTO.getstartOrEndFlag()#" cfsqltype="CF_SQL_INTEGER">
  AND AdmTypeReqID= <cfqueryparam value="#arguments.DTO.getAdmTypeReqID()#" cfsqltype="CF_SQL_INTEGER" null="#iif(arguments.DTO.getAdmTypeReqID(),true,false)#">
  
</cfquery>

Notice the last line is using the function IIF instide the null attribute of cfqueryparam.  In the SQL Insert and Update statements, this just works.  I am noticing in interacting with MSSQL 2005 this is not working.  I am getting zero rows back when it should be in the 5-10 rows. For now I have replaced my last line of code with the following 5 rows of code

AND 
   <cfif arguments.dto.getAdmTypeReqID() EQ "">
   AdmTypeReqID is null
   <cfelse>
   AdmTypeReqID = <cfqueryparam value="#arguments.DTO.getAdmTypeReqID()#" cfsqltype="CF_SQL_INTEGER" >
   </cfif>

Has anyone else ran into this?

coldbox environment safe email service

Almost a year ago I updated an interceptor I built for coldBox to allow our non-production environments (development and testing) to have a smart configuration that it DOES NOT send the email to the production users.  And I just realized that I never wrote a blog post on it.

Using the core functionality of coldbox, I configure our development and test environments to have its own configuration.

ie.

function configure() {
     environments = {
          localDevelopment = "URL.local",
          development = "URL"
     };
 }


function localDevelopment() {
     //Register interceptors as an array, we need order
     local.newInterceptors = {class="EnvironmentSafeMailService",
          properties={EmailTrace=true, EmailSend=false, EmailOverrideAddress="email@address.com"}
     };
ArrayAppend(interceptors ,local.newInterceptors);

         }


Here is the link to the two download areas

My WebSite:
http://extra.cfhero.com/coldbox-add-ons/coldbox-environmentsafeemail

ForgeBox:
http://coldbox.org/forgebox/view/ColdBox-Interceptor---Environment-Safe-Mail-Service

If you are curious how I built it, here is my earlier blog post on that.
http://www.cfhero.com/2009/11/enhancing-coldbox-adding-core.html

coldfusion builder 2 extension not displaying browse button on type=projectdir

I'm in the process of creating an extension that fires from the RDSView (from a database table).  Basically I would like it to create 7 files for me by using the table's columns I selected.  *PERFECT*, I got the files being created, but I have to TYPE in the LOCATION to store the files <-- WHAT --  Yes, I said I have to type in the full path to where I want the files to be stored.

So my question to anyone who might see this blog is -->  Is there a way via (call back, response, etc) in an cfbuilder extension for the user to pick the project and/or folder as an input?

PS.  if you read this and don't know the answer, please "socialize" it (tweet, FaceBook, etc) so possibly the correct person with the answer can answer it.  *THANKS*

**UPDATE 9/29/2011**
I was able to email a contact at Adobe with this issue, and after working back and forth, it came up that the input of type="projectdir" does NOT work when using a REMOTE server. How disappointing!!  Anyways, at the same time I suggested it as a feature as #2988224 within the Adobe ColdFusion Builder Bug/Feature system (bugbase @ https://bugbase.adobe.com/).