CFEclipse Themerations

The first two months of the year are always the toughest for me. In early January my middle school basketball coaching starts up in earnest (we start pre-season practices in late October but those are just not the same as when the real season gets rolling). I basically spend the first 8 weeks of the year treading water; keeping my clients' projects moving along but not really having much time for other projects and such. Well, my basketball season ends Saturday and that's all about to change! 

Yesterday, on a short break, I perused some tweets and came across one from @bitterweetryan that caught my eye. The idea in his tweet is simple: CFML developers need to branch out and learn new languages. Then, we should bring back ideas from these learnings, if you will, to CFML. It's an excellent idea. 

Over the last 10 years, I have found no better web development option than CFML. And, I've found no better group of developers with whom to interact, work and share. We CFML'ers love our language dearly, but sometimes, I see us get stuck in the ways of the force, 'er CFML, and fail to see the other options or approaches that surround us. 

With this in mind, I am going to begin a set of classes at the O'Reilly School of Technology (OST) to get 'certified' in in Python starting this Monday. As I get going on the courses required to earn the Python certificate, I am going to implement some things I learn into my on-going CFML project at Kronum.com. Naturally I'll write long-winded, inane blog posts about the process. 

I'm very excited to get started and, once again, want to give a shout out to Ryan Anklam for the initial inspiration to get this ball rolling. 

Also, and for a bit of fun, you can see my old testimonial on the OST 'Why' page. I'm the one with the humongous snake wrapped around my neck. That sounds worse than it is ... really ;-)!

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Spreadsheets Made Even Easier in Railo

First and foremost, I want to give a huge shout out and thanks to Andy Jarrett (@andyj and Blog ) for his work on the tag & functions extension for Railo. His work on this extension, and making it publicly available for all of us, just made my life infinitely easier.

The Problem

My client wanted to get a list of all members on his site who have logged in over the last year. He wanted to know how many times each user logged in each month over the previous year (previous year being determined by the current date). He wanted the data presented in an XLS file, sorted from the most logons to the least.

The Solution

We all know that there are plenty of ways to go about creating a spreadsheet from CFML and none of them are too awful. However, I needed something that would be very easy and fast because I knew the data was going to be a bit of a bear to work with and time was limited. The new CF9 spreadsheet functionality fit the bill, however, it has not yet been incorporated into the Railo core.

At the database level, I had some fun creating a couple of UDFs and a View so that I could easily call for this data from CFML. No problems here. Okay, I’ll confess that the view and udfs were a bit tricky … but they were fun problems to solve (NERD ALERT :)!

Enter Andy’s extension. To start, I had to install the extension on Railo (duh). Like the update process for Railo, it’s incredibly easy to add extensions to your Railo server. Since Andy wrote up all the basics needed for installation on his blog, you should check out his post http://www.andyjarrett.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/2011/¼/cfspreadsheet-for-Railo-update for installation/setup details.

Once the extension was installed and the server restarted, which took a few minutes tops, all of CF9’s spreadsheet functions and the cfspreadsheet tag are now at my disposal in Railo.

From here, it took me ~10 minutes to write and test the code that would generate and output my XLS file … and this is all the code it took!

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// the CFC I use to grab the data
component displayname="MemberActivity" hint="I generate reports on Member Activity"{

	public MemberActivity function init(){
		return this;
	}

	public query function getMemberLogonActivity(){
		var result = "";
		var q_service = new query();
		q_service.setDatasource(MYDSNVAR);
		q_service.setName("getMemberLogonActivity");
		q_service.setSQL(
			"SELECT first_name, last_name, email, state, registration_date, personality_factor, 
			month_1_logons, month_2_logons, month_3_logons, month_4_logons, month_5_logons, month_6_logons,
			month_7_logons, month_8_logons, month_9_logons, month_10_logons, month_11_logons, month_12_logons,
			total_annual_logons
			FROM vw_MemberLogonActivity
			WHERE total_annual_logons > 0
			ORDER BY total_annual_logons DESC"
		);
		result = q_service.execute();
		return result.getResult();
	}

}

// In the calling template: 
<cfscript>
	service = createObject("component","MemberActivity").init();
	activity = service.getMemberLogonActivity();
	// first we create the spreadsheet object
	spreadsheet = spreadsheetNew("memberactivityreport");
	// next we add the header row
	spreadsheetAddRow(spreadsheet,"first_name, last_name, email, state, registration_date, personality_factor, month_1_logons, month_2_logons, month_3_logons, month_4_logons, month_5_logons, month_6_logons, month_7_logons, month_8_logons, month_9_logons, month_10_logons, month_11_logons, month_12_logons, total_annual_logons");
	// I want to format my headers so that they're bold and centered
	spreadsheetFormatRow(spreadsheet,{bold=true,alignment="center"},1);
	// Ah, CFML how I love you. Just use the spreadsheetAddRows method to add your entire query to the spreadsheet
	spreadsheetAddRows(spreadsheet,activity);
	// finally, write the file to the server/file system
	spreadsheetWrite(spreadsheet,"/path/to/file/member_activity_#dateFormat(now(),'mm_dd_yyyy')#.xls");
</cfscript>
</pre>

CFMLove

I love the fact that CFML (and Andy’s extension!) allowed me to spend the majority of my time working on the data and, once I had that sorted, I did not have to eff around trying to figure out how to present it. That part was easy and just freaking worked!

If you need to do some spreadsheet output and you’re on Railo, be sure to checkout the extension. I’m pretty sure you’ll be as stoked about it as I am!

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