ColdFusion

Using Dreamweaver to work with .cfmail files

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I had a BIG problem recently at a hosting company for a project I work on. They had “something go wrong” during an upgrade to ColdFusion 8 and they lost our site’s settings from ColdFusion 7. Rather than wasting valuable time trying to get them to restore a backup and redo the upgrade I forged on trying to set everything right.

One of the problems I came across was that the hosting company set the mail server to be a different one than what we had for CF7. Why did this matter? Well, there were about 300 messages sitting in the “Undelivr” folder that needed to go out. In each of those messages was the old (now incorrect) mail server info. Since I was under the gun to get the mail out I pulled them all down via FTP to parse through them with Dreamweaver.

I used this article to configure Dreamweaver to edit my extensions.txt file to be able to open and perform search and replace on .cfmail files:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_16410

Here is a what the extensions.txt file looks like:

Dreamweaver\'s extensions.txt file

Once I got all of the .cfmail files updated, I FTP’d them back into the spool folder for re-processing. No dice. ColdFusion moved it all back to the “Undelivr” folder with a cryptic error:

The ColdFusion Mail Spool Encountered An Invalid Spool File In The Spool Directory. The invalid file MailXXXXXX.cfmail was moved to the undeliverable directory.

The next step… Hot Fix. Read about it here.

After the Hot Fix I again dropped the .cfmail files back into the spool folder for re-processing. This time… Sweet Success.

Enabling SSL on the ColdFusion 8 built-in web server

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This tutorial assumes default install location for ColdFusion 8 on Windows XP.

The first thing you need to do is to create a keystore. This can be done with the keytool utility. I used the one that is part of ColdFusion 8.

Open a command prompt.

Execute the following command:
cd C:\ColdFusion8\runtime\jre\bin

Create the keystore with this command:
keytool -genkey -dname "cn=127.0.0.1, ou=CF, o=cfchimp, L=Decatur, ST=GA, C=US" -keyalg rsa -keystore mykey

If you have previously configured a keystore you might run into this error:
keytool error: java.lang.Exception: Key pair not generated, alias already exists

If you got the “already exists” error run this command to list the keystores:
keytool -list -v | more

If you got the “already exists” error run this command to delete the keystore:
keytool -delete -alias mykey

If you got the “already exists” error re-run the command to create the keystore.

Enter in a password when prompted (2 times)

Move the keystore file (mykey) to C:\ColdFusion8\runtime\lib\

Edit the config file C:\ColdFusion8\runtime\servers\coldfusion\SERVER-INF\jrun.xml with an xml editor of choice. This file is VERY sensitive so be sure to not screw up the syntax of it. You should probably make a copy of it before you edit it.


<!-- Uncomment this service to use SSL with the JRun Web Server
Note that you MUST create your own keystore before using this service -->
<service class="jrun.servlet.http.SSLService" name="SSLService">
<attribute name="enabled">true </attribute>
<attribute name="interface">* </attribute>
<attribute name="port">9100 </attribute>
<attribute name="keyStore">{jrun.rootdir}/lib/mykey </attribute>
<attribute name="keyStorePassword">mypassword </attribute>
<attribute name="trustStore">{jrun.rootdir}/lib/trustStore </attribute>
<attribute name="socketFactoryName">jrun.servlet.http.JRunSSLServerSocketFactory </attribute>
</service>

Restart the ColdFusion8 application service.

Create a test page in the ColdFusion 8 wwwroot and opening it in a web browser using: https://127.0.0.1:9100/testpage.cfm

You should be good to go.

REFERENCES:
For some keytool commands: http://www.instantssl.com/ssl-certificate-support/server_faq/ssl-server-certificate-java.html
Adobe instructions: http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/using/ssl_with_cf_web_server/ssl_with_cf_web_server03.html

Coldfusion Administrator (CFAdmin) Improperly Framed

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Has anyone ever logged into the Colfusion Administrator to find it improperly framed? Once you click a link in the outermost frame the problem goes away. Initially, it looks like this:

Coldfusion Administrator (CFAdmin) Improperly Framed

If you have seen this (and know how to fix it) PLEASE let me know. It has looked like this on our server at work since CF6 and I have finally grown weary of it.

Thanks!

CFGRID DateFormat

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For some reason when you have a datetime field in a cfgrid column it displays in a long format like this: Nov 17 2006 01:00:00

Fig 1 (Below) A date displayed in cfgrid

CFGRID DateFormat Before

If we work a little SQL magic (using “CONVERT”) in the cfquery though we can do the formatting we want, which is: 11/17/2006. Refer to the “styles” listed in Figure 3 to see what formatting is available.

Coldfusion Query:

SELECT note_id,note_text,
CONVERT(varchar,note_date,101) as note_date
FROM tbl_notes
ORDER BY note_date

Fig 2 (Below) A date displayed in cfgrid after using CONVERT in cfquery

CFGRID DateFormat After

Fig 3 (Below) A helpful list of “styles” to use with the SQL CONVERT function
Style ID Style Type
0 or 100 mon dd yyyy hh:miAM (or PM)
101 mm/dd/yy
102 yy.mm.dd
103 dd/mm/yy
104 dd.mm.yy
105 dd-mm-yy
106 dd mon yy
107 Mon dd, yy
108 hh:mm:ss
9 or 109 mon dd yyyy hh:mi:ss:mmmAM (or PM)
110 mm-dd-yy
111 yy/mm/dd
112 yymmdd
13 or 113 dd mon yyyy hh:mm:ss:mmm(24h)
114 hh:mi:ss:mmm(24h)
20 or 120 yyyy-mm-dd hh:mi:ss(24h)
21 or 121 yyyy-mm-dd hh:mi:ss.mmm(24h)
126 yyyy-mm-dd Thh:mm:ss.mmm(no spaces)
130 dd mon yyyy hh:mi:ss:mmmAM
131 dd/mm/yy hh:mi:ss:mmmAM

I just took a huge cfdump

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cfdump top

Har har. Scatological humor and programming.

So I learned something today that I didn’t know even though I have been using Coldfusion for years. It’s kind of embarrassing actually. Everyone has used cfdump a million times to debug query output. Sometimes a query might return many records though and you don’t really need to see them all. Apparently there is a “top” attribute you can use to limit the number of rows returned. Nice.