CFBloggers

Today I joined the CFBloggers group, started by Charlie Arehart. Anyone interested in discussing blogging in/on/about ColdFusion should check out Charlie's blog entry on the group and consider joining.

Posted in Meta July 13 2007

Certified, Baby!

I almost forgot to mention - I passed my CFMX7 certification exam today, and did well enough to get "Advanced" status. To be honest, I never even thought of getting certified until my boss asked me if I was interested; but I'm glad he asked. :)

Now... where do I find that Certified logo to put in my sidebar?

Posted in ColdFusion July 03 2007

Serving Dynamic JavaScript includes with ColdFusion

Today I came across the need to serve up a dynamic javascript include. What does that mean? It means that I had this code in place:

<script language="JavaScript" src="CustomWrappers.js"></script>

And I wanted CustomWrappers.js to return different content based on some query string parameters I would pass in.

First, as a quick proof of concept, I simply copied the contents of CustomWrappers.js into a new file I created called CustomWrappers.cfm, and changed the src attribute of my script tag to use this new file.

<script language="javascript" src="CustomWrappers.cfm"></script>

Eventually, I want to be able to do this:

<script language="javascript" src="CustomWrappers.cfm?myVar=#myVal#&myVar2=#myVal2#"></script>

Unfortunately, that did not work - IIS served the template content as text/html, rather than text/plain; which we can't complain about, because that's what it should do when you request a CFM template. I tried adding this line to the top of the template:

<cfcontent type="text/plain">

Later, when I was discussing this issue with Ray Camden, he said this should be all I have to do. And I probably would have agreed with him immediately, if I hadn't already seen it not work. As it turns out, this is a perfectly valid solution - but the reason it wouldn't work for me is that my development environment runs the Developer Edition of MX7, and with debugging enabled; so what is returned when the browser requests that file is:

<META NAME="ColdFusionMXEdition" CONTENT="ColdFusion DevNet Edition - Not for Production Use."> [my javascript content] </td></td></td></th></th></th></tr></tr>........................

And so on, with the debug output; which is obviously not valid JavaScript syntax. Unfortunately, the Meta tag will cause issue with the JavaScript, so using <cfsetting showDebugOutput="false"> won't totally resolve the issue. In order to get around this annoyance, I used the following code:

<cfsavecontent variable="theJS"> [my javascript content] </cfsavecontent> <cfcontent type="text/plain" variable="#CharsetDecode(theJS, 'utf-8')#">

This definitely takes more time to process, but resolved the issue of serving dynamic JS includes with CF in developer mode and debugging enabled.

Posted in ColdFusion | JavaScript July 03 2007