ColdFusion Builder. Servers View Issue

I've been using ColdFusion Builder since last Fall for all development work on a large ColdFusion-powered Flex application. All in all, it's been a good IDE since the public Beta 3 was released in December. However, what I was able to do today made the $299 I paid for the Flash Builder 4 Premium upgrade, which comes with CFB 1.0, worth every penny: Refactoring. 

Here's the short scenario of why I was refactoring in the first place: 
The application was initially built on ColdFusion 8 and the original CF developer created a file that gets included in most CFCs. This file contains a series of commonly used functions. However, we're currently in the process of migrating the CFML engine to Railo 3.1.2 and several of the functions in this utility file have the same name as functions in Railo 3.1.

For example, the original developer created a "dump" function to, well, dump messages or errors from within CFScript blocks. This function is scattered throughout the application (100s of references) and I need to rename it ( new name will be "_dump"). In the "old" days of CFML coding, this meant using the not-so-reliable project search and replace in Eclipse or manually going through each file and finding/replacing the entries. Well, not any more!

In CFB, I simply open the file in question and highlight the value of the name attribute of my desired function (dump). I then right-click on the highlighted name and select "Refactor -> Rename" from the context menu. Next, I enter the new name of my method (_dump) and am presented with two options: (1) preview all the changes CFB will make across the project or (2) select OK and let CFB run wild and make the updates. I tend to go with Preview first ... but only because I'm paranoid :).

I know that for other language developers (ActionScript, Java, etc.), this may be trivial, but, for us CF developers it's freaking sweet!

Posted via web from Craig Kaminsky's posterous

I was trying to figure out a solution to a minor problem that we recently ran into with our project. In brief, we have a CFC that communicates, as a RemoteObject, with our Flex front-end. One of the methods in this CFC receives an array of objects and must store the object data in our database. There are a few scenarios where this array of objects could contain duplicates. After some discussion, we opted to have the back-end (CFML) check for and remove duplicate objects, should they exist, from the array.

This is a task I've often had to do with lists, which is quite simple with CFML alone. But with these array of objects, I had to verify that each property in the object matched another object. I considered a solution wherein I looped over the array of objects and performed the necessary comparisons on each property, and so on down the line.

While I knew I could make it work, everything I thought of felt like too much code and unnecessarily cumbersome/complex. I kept thinking that there had to be a way to use Java to help myself out. I am always looking for ways I can 'sneak' a little Java into my applications. However, not being an accomplished Java programmer (to say the least), it's really tough to pull off!

Anyway, I did a little research on removing duplicate objects from arrays in ColdFusion and found a really helpful post from Adam Presley (http://blog.adampresley.com/2009/removing-duplicate-array-items-in-coldfusion/) that got me started. Adam's post and code snippets worked great when I sent in an array of simple objects (strings, integers, and the like) but I wasn't able to remove duplicates when I passed in the array of objects. Even though it did not directly solve my problem, Adam's post helped me in that I was able to see a clear and related example of how I could use Java to my advantage in a CF project.

In terms of using Java in ColdFusion, I (too) often forget that you can just call native Java methods on ColdFusion objects. However, I am not well-versed in what those methods might be for a specific ColdFusion object. I did a little Googling and found a handy post from Christian Cantrell on how you can tell what data types a ColdFusion object inherits from Java. As noted in his post, a ColdFusion array inherits from the java.util.Vector. A 'quick' perusal of the Java API docs and I learned of two important, relevant methods available to Vectors: add and contains. 

Contains and add do exactly what you might expect. Contains checks the array to see if it already contains the passed in object and returns a boolean. Add will add the object to an array. These methods are incredibly helpful and here's how it solved my problem. 

function removeDuplicatesFromArrayOfObjects(aryOfObjects){   
  var deduped_array = [];      
  for(i = 1; i < arrayLen(arguments.aryOfObjects); i++){
    if( !deduped_array.contains(arguments.aryOfObjects[i]) ){
      deduped_array.add(arguments.aryOfObjects[i]); // it's so cool how you just call .add on a CF array!
    }
  }   
  return deduped_array;
}

One thing I noticed is that the contains method evaluated objects as equal regardless of the casing of a string. For example, I had two objects where one string property was "A" and another was "a". The contains method saw them as the same. There may (probably?) be a way to prevent this behavior and treat strings with differing cases as unique objects but I honestly don't know enough ... yet ;).

I haven't quite mastered Posterous's syntax highlighting and don't think it supports ColdFusion, so I converted my CFML tag-based function to a script-based one (and in the process may have messed something up ... apologies if that's the case but it seems ok).

I know this isn't an earth-shattering revelation or the most kick-ass use of ColdFusion's Java prowess but it saved me a good bit of time and for those, like me, who are often unsure of how you can leverage Java in CFML, I wanted to post my experience. Plus, it's only six freaking lines of code to find duplicate objects in an array of objects!!

Posted via web from Craig Kaminsky's posterous