Last year I got my first ColdFusion certification, just in time for a new version of CF to come out and make me feel like I was behind again. Since the test is only $150, I figure I might as well upgrade to a CF8 certification.

I've heard rumors that thanks to Ray, the CF8 exam is much tougher than the CF7 exam. And since it's going to be harder, and I really don't want to lose the "Advanced" level, I'm going to prepare pretty hard. Last year I did self-study, and it was pretty overwhelming — there's just so much material and you don't get a great idea for what to study. This year, I'm going to prepare with the recently released CF8 Exam Buster training software.

I've already got it installed and gone through the first test, and I'm confident it's going to help me be prepared for the exam. I'll post again after I get my exam results and let you know what I think of CF8 Exam Buster, and whether or not I maintained my "advanced" level certification.

I've been working on a project where we're using Illudium to generate some objects (beans, dao's, and gateways) to speed up our development process. We also happen to be using ColdFusion 8, which means we have access to great new features, like the primary key return value from an insert query. During a presentation on how to use Illudium and how it saves us time and effort, my team saw that I was: (1) Inserting a record, then (2) Creating a bean with all of the properties of that record except its missing id value, and then (3) searching for the matching record — so that I could use its ID in related code; and asked if there was any way to improve that. That's when it dawned on me that CF8 returns the primary key value (in most cases — Oracle just returns the "RowID" which can be used to look up the primary key), for just this reason. By the end of the day I had modified the XSLT template for the Create function in the DAO object that's packaged with Illudium to return this value instead of true or false indication of success — and with no prior knowledge or experience with XSLT. It was simple to extend my code so that it wouldn't error on earlier versions of ColdFusion (instead of the primary key value, it will return 1/-1 for success/failure), and also to account for other database types. All types documented by Adobe are supported here. Here's the updated code for create.xsl. Note that the majority of what I changed is at the end: [viewcode] src="create.xsl.txt" showsyntax=no geshi=xml scroll="yes" scrollheight="300px" link="yes" [/viewcode] And here's an example create function I made from the ART table of the CFArtGallery example datasource: [viewcode] src="fn_create.txt" showsyntax=no geshi=cfm scroll="yes" scrollheight="300px" [/viewcode] Brian Rinaldi, the creator of Illudium, offered to help me out if I got stuck, but honestly he's done such a good job architecting Illudium to be easily extended that it was a piece of cake. Thanks again for the awesome code generator, Brian!

I recently sat down to put together a blog post covering how to "bridge the gap" between a 404 and onMissingTemplate (because a .cfm file has to be requested before the web server hands the request off to ColdFusion), and I thought that it would make a great article for dzone, so I submitted it there instead. If you're intrigued by onMissingTemplate, but frustrated that it doesn't work for just a requested folder, go check it out!