ColdFusion RIA

Installing ColdFusion 9 64-but on Windows 7 64-bit Experience

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:55:00 -0400

This weekend I got me a new laptop from Dell (Studio 15). I got it with 4 GB RAM (to me it has become a minumum now) which naturally meant going with a 64-bit OS. So, I now had this nice new laptop with Windows 7 x64 and once I was done cleaning out the bloatware, it was time to install ColdFusion. It turned out to be quite an experience and took much longer then I anticipated. But first, lets get one thing straight here, Adobe doesn't really provide any documentation on what you need to do to install CF properly on IIS 7.5. There is no, "verify these windows component are installed" document or screen. In any case, I had installed ColdFusion 9 on Windows 32-bit succesfully, and needless to say I felt (over)confident that I could do the same for Windows 7 64-bit. I started out by configuring Windows have the IIS6 modules installed, I knew I had to do that. Then I ran the ColdFusion 9 install, no errors, got to the end, "Press OK to start CF Admin", did that. The CF Admin screen came up and did not work. IIS 7 told me about missing extension configuration. I realized at that point something was missed in my IIS reconfiguration, and it turned out it was the ISAPI Extensions under World Wide Web Services options, so I turned all those things on, Windows reconfigured IIS for me. I opened IIS, saw tha the ISAPI extensions and filters were not installed. Ready to go right? Wrong. Still could not get to CF Admin. Ok, lets uninstall and install CF9 I thought, since now IIS has everything it needs for proper configuration. So I did that, uninstall then install and once again pressed "OK" at the end. Out comes the CF Admin page, "Click here" to continue configuration. Yay, victory was my first though. But then I noticed, something was not right. There was no Adobe logo, no images were showing up. Doesn't matter, I was able to open a .cfm page, so I continued with the configuration and then was logged into the Admin. Still no images. By the way, the Admin looks really bad if you can't see images. So, I closed the browser and opened a new IE window and went to //localhost/cfide/administraor/ and IIS 7 gives me an Error!! But thats where the CF Admin is located, but apparently IIS can't handle the request properly. Sigh, I did some googling. Verified that the ISAPI handlers for .cfm extensions were pointing to the right DLL. Someone suggested uninstalling CF, deleting all CF directories and installing again. So I dd that, but same error again. Still can't see images in CF Admin. Frustrating, already installed CF9 3 times. Verified IIS setup again, all looks good there. I uninstall CF9 again, restart computer, delete directories, install CF9 again and same issue again. At that point, google had helped me as much as it can. I try to use the server configuration tool but I can't remove the current flawed IIS configuration from it (some error about not able to remove things). Decide it time to start from scratch. So, I uninstall CF9, delete CF directories, restart computer. Uninstall IIS7 from windows, restart computer. Then reinstall IIS7 and restart computer. Then reinstall CF9 and Victory!! Everything works properly. Apparently, installing the ISAP Extensions after installing CF9 screwed up the installs and configurations in IIS. So, well, it worked now. Logged into CF Admin, //localhost/cfide/administrator/ resolved properly. But that was not the End of the Story. Apparently, setting up a MS Access Datasource on Windows 64-bit is another issue faced by various users. You would get an error about DRIVERPATH not defined. Well I thought, if CF can't set it up, I will set it up in Windows and use ODBC socket. But the issue is that the 64-bit Windows don't come with the relevant drivers needed to setup Access Datasource in Windows. After trying to figure out how to resolve this, googling and finding some information here and there, not much help was found. In the end it was realized, that the Windows\System32\odbcad32.exe file contained the proper drivers but the Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe did not contain the drivers. So the solution was to copy over the .exe from System32 to SysWOW64. I went through with that and it worked!! Even though, ColdFusion still gave a DRIVERPATH undefned error, the datasource was verified properly and I could run all my MS Access based demos. Whew, finally, was done with setting up Coldfusion 9 64-bit on Windows 7 64-bit.

cffileupload Tag - Event Handlers

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:09:00 -0400

Continuing with exploring the new multi-file upload tag functionality in ColdFusion 9, this post will build on the previous post and add event handlers. We are able to work with 3 event handlers:

onComplete - Called after each file finishes uploading
onError - Called when a file upload errors out
onUploadComplete - Called when all the files finish uploading

Have a look at the Demo.
Lets take a look at the code.

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Blog 1 Year Anniversary and Looking Forward to Another Year

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 02:36:00 -0400

The blog was officially launched on 1/5/2009. The first true knowledge sharing entry came on 1/8/2009, so its been 1 year and 1 week since I started bloging. It has been an excellent journey till now and I am sure it will continue to be. The main idea behind the Blog was to motivate me to continue learning new things and it did serve that purpose. While it took me more than an year to really look at whats new in ColdFusion 8, but with ColdFusion 9 I was right in there with the beta. Now there are other community blogs I read daily and always end up learning something new everyday. I have a better understanding of Ajax and libraries such as ExtJS, YUI and jQuery. Of course, there is still a lot to learn too in all of them. I haven't blogged as much as I had hoped, there have been big periods of inactivity, sometimes due to a busy schedule, sometimes due to other reasons.

I would also like to thank the people who read the blog. It has been great to see some positive comments on some of the blog entries, so thanks for all the support.

There are some goals in mind for 2010:

Blog More - This is pretty simple. Blogging more will also mean I am learning more things.
Learn a Framework - I really feel that my next level of Proffesional Development should involve learning a framework. Even though, I have my own take on organizing code properly (that achieves to a good extent OO and MVC), learning a framework should be fun, challenging, exciting. I don't know which framework I am going to choose, but it will be one of the newer ones.
More ORM - ColdFusion 9 brought us ORM integration. I did dive into it during beta, its time to explore it further and learn ORM concepts.
jQuery 1.4 - A great library, a new version. Excellent opportunity to learn more about JavaScript, DOM, Ajax.
Attend a CF Conference - My intention was to attend CFinNC last year, but it didn't work out at the last moment. This year, I want to attend atleast one CF conference.
Local User Group Involvement - I haven't attended a single UG meeting. I am not sure how active they currently are, but need to look it up and start attending some meetings. Should be a great place to meet new people and learn new things.
AIR/Flex - I really need to first figure out which one to tackle first. On one hand, AIR seems very exciting. On the other hand, I have done some Flex before and increasing my understanding of it will also help me design AIR applications. Someone want to help me out here?

cffileupload Tag - Uploading Multiple Files

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 14:45:00 -0400

Back in beta, I had made a post on this new tag in ColdFusion 9. It creates a Flash interface allowing the user to upload multiple files to the server. A pretty easy way to achieve something powerful. Back in beta, there was also a bug with the funtionality. It was that ColdFusion was not automatically passing back Success, Failure messages. With the release now, that has been taken care of, so we can revise the beta code.

Have a look at the Demo

Lets take a look at how simple the code is

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ColdFusion 9 Demos Back Up

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 02:24:00 -0400

Most of the ColdFusion 9 demos are back online, as I got a monthly CF9 hosting account at hostek.com Unfortunately, the CF9 ORM and multi-file upload demos won't be available. The ORM demos because I don't have SQL Server at hostek and I will be revisiting the multi-file upload demo again soon.

ExtJS 3.0 Editor Grid with ColdFusion + Ext Toolbar Play

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:33:00 -0400

I hadn't looked at the Ext JS library in a while, but this weekend, I took a look at it with the idea of eventually building out a full CRUD grid using Ext JS and ColdFusion. It took some time, particularly trying to figure out the phantom records implementation, but its done now.

View the Demo

And as always, time to look at the code.

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Using jQuery based jqGrid with ColdFusion Revisited: Full CRUD grid with Advanced Searching

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:55:00 -0400

It has been a while since I made my last blog post as work has kept me very busy. Over the weekend I saw that a new jqGrid version had been released and that it contained in-built advanced searching (called multiple search). I also thought it was a good time to revisit my earlier blog post on a full CRUD grid and update it to 3.6 specifications.

This implementation uses the following jqGrid features:

Inbuilt Form based Add, Edit, Delete and Search functionality
Search is done using new Multiple Search feature
Exploration of a few additional colModel parameters

View the Demo : this is all realtime, any updates made will be reflected in the grid.
Now, lets look at the code

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ColdFusion 9 Demos Unavailable Currently

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:07:00 -0400

I was using Hostek's Beta hosting to host a demos for the ColdFusion 9 posts. The beta hosting was discontinued a few weeks back with the release of ColdFusion 9. As a result, the demo links in blog posts that are based on CF9 will not work, while I work on upgrading the blog to CF9 hosting and rehosting the demos. Sorry for the trouble.

Playing with jQuery UI : Part 1

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:25:00 -0400

I downloaded the jQuery UI library a few weeks back (should have done it earlier too). I started playing around with it, but work has been so busy did not get much time to look at it. Finally, found some time to do a basic tabs, accordians, sliders, progress bar demo. Its very basic, good start to learing how some of the things work.

View Demo

The progress bar demo is probably the most complex one, so code for it follows. [More]

Registration for CFinNC Conference Open (Free ColdFusion based Conference)

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:17:00 -0400

I am personally from Charlotte, so when the CFinNC Conference was announced, it was very exciting. I wanted to get to CFUnited this year but could not make it because of a very busy work schedule, so a weekend conference a few hours away was awesome. And on top of everything it is Free. Let me say that again, it is Free.

They put out a provisional list of speakers and its a very good list. A lot of people who I wanted to listen to in previous conferences will be there.

So head on over to cfinnc.com and register for it.

jqGrid 3.5 with jQuery UI ThemeRoller Themes Demos

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:54:00 -0400

jqGrid 3.5 was released yesterday. It includes lots of good features, including a new rendering engine for faster loading. It also now supports jQuery UI ThemeRoller themes, so to start off itself you have access to variety of styles and can create your own easily too.

So I went ahead and created a demo that shows the grid in all these themes.
View Demo

How I did this style selection switch, follows

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ColdFusion 9 cfgrid with ORM: Part 2 - Full CRUD Grid

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:35:00 -0400

Previously I blogged on getting a normal cfgrid running with ColdFusion. This post will look at expanding that to a full CRUD grid using ORM.

In addition to ColdFusion, I am also using jQuery and jqModalspecifically to display the modal boxes. Main reason being that I was itching to do some jQuery stuff.

Code follows. [More]

Quick Tip : When Working with jQuery and jqModal

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:26:00 -0400

This has stumped me twice, so best thought to make a blog post, for my own records and also for anybody who gets stuck at the same place.

Over the weekend, I have been working with jQuery and specifically jqModal for a full fledged CRUD Grid using ORM. For some of the alerts/forms I was using jqModal to show them. Everything worked fine on Firefox, but IE8 had issues. After an hour or so of searching, I realized that I had faced a similar issue when working with jqModal on IE before.

The problem is that since I do not wirte a lot of HTML in my day to day coding, I generally omit the DOCTYPE sepcification from my pages. This causes interesting issues on IE. So, the solution was to specify the DOCTYPE and everything was working smoothly in IE too. My DOCTYPE specification that solved these issues was:

See the difference:
DOCTYPE NOT Present
DOCTYPE Present

ColdFusion Builder Beta Impressions From a CFEclipse User

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:18:00 -0400

So I have been using the beta of ColdFusion Builder for around 3 weeks now, just thought I would blog some impressions. Keep in mind, these are my opinions and are based on the Beta version of ColdFusion Builder. These are also based on CFEclipse and ColdFusion Builder out of the box with some tweaks to both for performance.

Just to give a little background, I have been using CFEclipse for ColdFusion programming since March 2006, which is also when I learned ColdFusion. I was very excited to hear about Bolt from Adobe, so naturally when ColdFusion Builder came out, I started using it. In the time I have been using it, I have come to realize there are advantages and disadvantages to both.

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Adding Ext JS Buttons to ColdFusion 9 cfgrid Paging Toolbar

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:17:00 -0400

Just a quick post about how to go about adding custom buttons to the cfgrid's paging toolbar. I believe this has changed from Ext 1.1 (which ColdFusion 8 implements) to Ext 3.0 (which ColdFusion 9 implements).

You can see the normal cfgrid here. It comes with no buttons, and it as such with a grid implementation it would suit us if we could show add/edit/delete buttons.

So, you can get your pretty icons and add some nice buttons to the grid allowing users to perform operations. I have one up with an add button.

Code follows

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