Developer

Run CommandBox directly inside VSCode Terminal

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Run CommandBox directly inside VSCode Terminal

Initially I looked at the CommandBox documentation for running it inside VSCode: https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/ide-integrations/visual-studio-code. However, the Shell Launcher extension was deprecated in favor of Terminal Profiles in the Integrated Terminal (VSCode >= v1.55). See this article: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_55#_terminal-profiles.

Set up a Terminal Profile for CommandBox:

  1. Open VSCode Preferences > Settings
  2. Search for terminal.integrated.profiles.osx (Replace osx with windows or linux based on your os)
  3. Click “edit in settings.json”
  4. Add the following under terminal.integrated.profiles.osx
    "CommandBox": {
        "source": "path/to/box"
    }
  1. Close and save settings.json

Launch CommandBox from VSCode terminal

  1. Press Cmd + Shift + P or Ctrl + Shift + P to launch the Command Palette
  2. Begin typing Terminal
  3. When you see Create New Terminal (With Profile) press Enter
  4. Under Select the terminal profile to create you should see the CommandBox profile you created. Select it with the down arrow key and press Enter
  5. CommandBox should launch in the terminal window

Atom support for Emmet in ColdFusion .cfm and .cfc files

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I’m late to the party, but I’m trying out a new editor: GitHub’s Atom. My mission when I try out a new editor is to see if I can get the following 3 items set up properly (because if I can’t the editor is unfortunately not going to work for me).

  1. Language Support for ColdFusion
  2. An Emmet package
  3. Support for Emmet functionality within a .cfm, .cfc file

Setting up Language support for ColdFusion is easy. Simply install the language-cfml package. To install a package in Atom:

  • From the Atom editor menu, navigate to Atom -> Preferences
  • Click the Install button
  • Type language-cfml in the Search Packages field and click the Packages button
  • Click the Install button for the language-cfml package

Setting up Emmet is easy. Simply install the emmet package (see package install instructions above).

Setting up Emmet support for ColdFusion .cfm and .cfc files requires editing your Keymap. This step was derived from the emmet-atom Tab key documentation

  • Open the Keymap file (keymap.cson): Atom > Keymap...
  • Add the following to the keymap.cson file (proper indention counts):
'atom-text-editor[data-grammar="text html cfml"]:not([mini])':
    'tab': 'emmet:expand-abbreviation-with-tab'

Processing ColdFusion using .htm and .html files with Lucee

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If you want Lucee to use the .htm and .html file extensions instead of (or in addition to) .cfm and .cfml you can set this up in 3 quick steps.

1. Stop Lucee
2. Edit the web.xml file located at 

/conf/web.xml

From:


     CFMLServlet
     *.cfc
     *.cfm
     *.cfml
     /index.cfc/*
     /index.cfm/*
     /index.cfml/*

To:


     CFMLServlet
     *.cfc
     *.cfm
     *.cfml
     *.htm
     *.html
     /index.cfc/*
     /index.cfm/*
     /index.cfml/*

3. Start Lucee

Connecting ColdFusion 10 to FoxPro 9

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My company has a legacy application built in FoxPro 9 which contains a table that I need to extract data from on a recurring basis. I have never worked with FoxPro. Apparently in FoxPro each table has a corresponding .dbf file. For this example we will say that the table file is persons.dbf, which resides at C:\legacyapp\data\.

The first step for connecting ColdFusion to the FoxPro database was to find an acceptable driver. I initially tried to use some ODBC drivers but abandoned this route. Not only was it just not working, but I do my development on a Mac (whereas production is Windows) and I really wanted a solution that did not involve a Windows and a Mac configuration.

So the following steps describe how I set up a jdbc connection to FoxPro 9 from ColdFusion.

  1. Download the StelsDBF JDBC Driver
  2. Place the dbfdriver.jar file in {ColdFusion-Home}/cfusion/lib aka C:\ColdFusion10\cfusion\lib\
  3. Restart the ColdFusion services
  4. Login to the CFADMIN and set up a Data Source
    • For ‘Data Source Name’ enter ‘legacyapp’
    • For ‘Driver’ select ‘Other’
    • Click ‘Add’
    • For JDBC URL enter ‘jdbc:jstels:dbf:c:/legacyapp/data’
    • For Driver Class enter ‘jstels.jdbc.dbf.DBFDriver2’
    • Click ‘Submit’
  5. When using cfquery to select data use the file name as the table name: 
    SELECT 
    LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME
FROM
    persons

It was actually not too bad to set up once I located the driver.

Clean Up Google Drive Icon Files

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I had a Git repo that I was storing on Google Drive (Yes that probably was not a great idea, but it was a lazy way of sharing some pdfs in the repo with a non-technical coworker). The Google Drive app on the Mac uses an “Icon” file to indicate sync statuses of folders.  Unfortunately this kept screwing up the repo by also putting “Icon” files in all the folders in the .git directory.  Having the repo was more important than it being in Google Drive so I moved the folder out of Google Drive.  Once the folder was moved the “Icon” files remained and the repo was still throwing an error when I tried to code in Adobe Brackets.

Here is how I cleaned up all the Google Drive “Icon” files.

WARNING: BE SURE YOU DON’T HAVE FILES NAMED WITH “Icon” AS THE FIRST 4 LETTERS OR THIS WILL DELETE THEM.

  1. Open terminal
  2. Change directories into the folder that was once in Google Drive
  3. Issue the following terminal command: 
    find . -name 'Icon*' -type f -delete

Now the repo is back to normal.

SQL Server SELECT into existing table

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This morning I needed to add a single record to an existing table in database1 from an existing table in database2. Here’s how I was able to do it:

INSERT INTO database1.dbo.tablename
     SELECT *  
     FROM 
          database2.dbo.tablename
     WHERE 
          ID='4d08aeb0bedd01452dfef3eabc2816dcc75533c8'

Please note that the databases use a SHA-1 Hash for the ID field. If you use an IDENTITY field in SQL you’d have to take some extra steps to briefly allow inserting an IDENTITY field.

Using a ColdFusion Ternary Operator for an Optional Tag Attribute

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Today I had to write a script to process a form and send an email as part of the processing. The form allows the user to specify an email address to bcc, but it’s not required. I’m a big fan of using the Ternary Operator for doing either/or stuff like css classes. So I decided to extend that fandom to set the bcc attribute of the <cfmail> tag if the email specified in the form was valid.

Assumptions for this example:

1. You have validated form.bccEmail as a valid email.
2. You have a default mail server specified in Application.cfc or CFADMIN.
3. You may see more utility in using the Ternary Operator for other conditional cases.

The “magic” is in the bcc attribute below:

    
	    Message Body here...

ColdFusion function returns space before value

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I had an annoying issue this morning where a function I wrote that rounds and formats values for use in an internal financial app kept sticking a single space before the value returned. This was obviously not good for a financial app. After spending 10-15 minutes tearing the function’s innards apart it turns out what was going on in the function was not the cause. The cause was simple.

In a tag based ColdFusion function you need to be sure to include the ‘output=”no”‘ attribute.

 
     ... MAGIC STUFF HERE ...

A LESS Mixin to change font-color based on font-size

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Just a little LESS fun for the day… Here is a LESS Mixin to change font-color based on font-size.

Green big.
Yellow just right.
Red little.

It can be used with or without passing units (without units will use pixels). Adds bold just for fun.


.colorBySize(@pxValue) when (@pxValue < 12px){ color:red; } .colorBySize(@pxValue) when (@pxValue =< 16px) and (@pxValue >= 12px){
color:yellow;
}

.colorBySize(@pxValue) when (@pxValue > 16px){
color:green;
}

.colorBySize(@_) when not (ispixels(@_)){
font-size: ~"@{_}px";
// font-size: @_;
font-weight: bold;
}

.colorBySize(@_) when (ispixels(@_)){
font-size: @_;
font-weight: bold;
}

p.little{
.colorBySize(9);
}

p.justright{
.colorBySize(12);
}

p.big{
.colorBySize(18);
}

Copy files from one Windows server to another and retain permissions

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Just want the script?

If you don’t want to read the blah blah blah you can access robocopy-script on Github

I want to know the details…

At my day job I was tasked with migrating several websites and folders from one Windows server to another. The sites have a ton of quirky permissions settings because they are mostly intranet sites. Several have anonymous browsing turned off. As you may or may not know if you just copy them via drag and drop in File Explorer you will lose all of those permissions that took years to refine. Additionally you will lose creation dates, etc.

After some research I determined that Robocopy was what I needed to retain all that valuable cruft information. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you dig command line stuff) Robocopy is a command line tool with quite a few flags. A little more digging revealed there is a GUI for Robocopy which allows you to save scripts, but I decided to roll my own script.

Features:

  • A simple “config” section in the script where you define the to/from locations
  • A config option to run attended or unattended (set this in the script)
  • Logging
  • Utilization of the following flags (descriptions are verbatim from the Robocopy documentation):
    • /E – Copies all subdirectories (including empty ones).
    • /SEC – Copies NTFS security information. (Source and destination volumes must both be NTFS). Equivalent to /COPY:DATS.
    • /COPY:DATSO – Copies the file information specified by copyflags, which can be any combination of the following : D – file Data. | A – file Attributes | T – file Timestamps. | S – file Security (NTFS ACLs). | O – file Ownership information.
    • /V – Produces verbose output (including skipped files).
    • /TEE – Displays output in the console window, in addition to directing it to the log file specified by /LOG or /LOG+.
    • /NP – Turns off copy progress indicator (% copied). **
    • /LOG – Redirects output to the specified file, overwriting the file if it already exists.
    • /B – Copies files in Backup mode (Backup copies are not restartable, but can copy some files that restartable mode cannot). ***
    • /R:10 – Specifies the number of retries on failed copies. (The default is 1 million.)
    • /W:30 – Specifies the wait time between retries. (The default is 30 seconds.)

** I liked seeing the progress as it copied, but all those percentages get written to the log file same as the screen.
*** Consider /Z to use restartable mode.

Obviously you could tweak the flags in the script to get a combination more suitable for you.

If this sounds like something you might find useful you can access robocopy-script on Github. I should note that this is my first public repo on Github. Yay.