Rails HAML Heads Up with CSRF Tag and Destroy Calls

Steve Bryant recently suggested we make August 1, "How I Got Started in ColdFusion" day. The idea is to get as many CFML developers to write a blog post detailing how they got started with ColdFusion. I think it's a wonderful idea and, as such, following is my own story. 

My first forray into ColdFusion began late in the magical decade that brought us grunge, a revival of hippie/jam-band music, and a booming economy: the 90's. I had just finished my Masters degree in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and was moving (back) to the Washington DC area to get married. After an extended honeymoon of several months backpacking in the US West and another several months in Europe, I needed a job. Surprisingly, an MA in Anthropology did not yield jobs outside of a McDonald's. Weird, I know. 

Shortly after I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1992, I got a job at Quark, Inc. as a support technician. After a couple years at Quark, I was asked to and happily pitched in on the company's first-ever website. As a result of my QuarkXPress knowledge and experience, I was able to get a job in the marketing department for Government Executive magazine; designing and laying out brochures, simple HTML websites/web pages for events, mailers and the like.

After a month on the job, my boss requested that I build a website for an upcoming conference our magazine. The company's online magazine was built with ColdFusion 4.0 and we decided that it would be best for me to go ahead and use ColdFusion to build my marketing site. So, I set off one day after work with the following book under my arm: 

I spent a week, and this is what I LOVE about CFML, working through the book and some examples. One week later, we had a database-driven website for our upcoming Excellence in Government 2001 Conference. I just think this is the amazing thing about CFML ... I knew some HTML and some JavaScript and before I knew it, I had a nice looking, fully functional database-driven website to promote and provide all the required details about our upcoming conference. From a total novice to a solid, well working (albeit not a complex) site in two weeks ... that is just awesome! 

Okay, fine ... get picky ... I was using Access and maybe calling that a database-driven site is giving it a bit too much credit :). I kid. I kid. 

The site was a huge success and before I knew it my job had morphed from a marketing person to, basically, a web developer creating ColdFusion-driven websites for every thing and anything our directors could think of. 

From there, I never looked back. Anthropology was a thing of the past and web development with ColdFusion was the way forward. And I could not be happier about how it all unfolded. 

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I’ve been talking with a fellow CF'er and he was having some trouble getting SES URLs rolling in a Tomcat and CFWheels application that he’s working on. Since I had to go through all sorts of ‘fun’ times with SES URLs and Wheels a year ago, I thought I’d write up a little post on my experiences and how I got the URLs I want. And, really, it ain’t that bad.

URLRewriteFilter

First things first, download the excellent Java Web Filter library, URLRewriteFilter. Once downloaded, expand the Zip Archive. You will see a WEB-INF folder, inside of which, are two important items: urlrewrite.xml and lib/urlrewrite-3.2.0.jar. From here, it’s not too difficult to figure out what’s next … move these items (the XML and JAR) into the corresponding locations in your application’s WEB-INF folder. Note that you may need to create a lib folder in your WEB-INF (I did).

WEB.XML

Next up, you need to add a declaration to your web.xml file (also located in WEB-INF) so that your server knows to load the URLRewriteFilter JAR. The addition is pretty simple.

UrlRewriteFilter org.tuckey.web.filters.urlrewrite.UrlRewriteFilter   UrlRewriteFilter /*

Now the filter will be loaded when your server starts.

URLREWRITE.XML

Next, you need to instruct the URLRewriteFilter how to filter and pass on your requests, which is done by providing the conditions under which the filter should not run (in this case). For Wheels, there were two levels at which I did not want the filter to kick in:

• when certain folders were requested
• when specific files were requested

For organization and readability, I organized my filter declarations by folders and then files. As you can see from the XML document belowm I select all the major folders where your CFML server is doing stuff (e.g., flex2gateway or railo-context) or where static files are server (e.g., javascripts, stylesheets).

Once your conditions are in place, you need to just tell the filter from what and to which URLs should it rewrite. For Wheels, this appears as follows:

/flex2gateway/* /jrunscripts/* /cfide/* /files/* /flash/* /images/* /javascripts/* /miscellaneous/* /stylesheets/*   /railo-context/*    /robots.txt /sitemap.xml /404.shtml /favicon.ico ^(.*)$ /rewrite.cfm?\$pathinfo=$1&%{query-string}

CFWheels

The last piece of the puzzle … the framework itself. There are two (easy) steps to making URL rewrites happen in Wheels:

• Tell Wheels to turn on URLRewriting
• Edit a single core file in Wheels

The first step is super-duper easy. Just add the following line in your config/settings.cfm file:

The second step is also easy but it’s important to remember you need to do this everytime you update Wheels (I checked that the current version, 1.1.5 at the time of writing, still requires this edit).

• Open wheels/dispatch/request.cfm.
• Locate the $getPathFromRequest method (it’s in a different spot in earlier versions of Wheels but in 1.1.5 you can find it at line 120)
• Edit this method so that it goes from the first code snippet to the second.

First:

var returnValue = ""; // we want the path without the leading "/" so this is why we do some checking here if (arguments.pathInfo == arguments.scriptName || arguments.pathInfo == "/" || arguments.pathInfo == "") returnValue = ""; else returnValue = Right(arguments.pathInfo, Len(arguments.pathInfo)-1);

Second:

var returnValue = "";  // ensure that the $pathinfo var is picked up from the URL struct when using URLRewriting via Tomcat/URLRewriteFilter if (StructKeyExists(url, "$pathinfo")) arguments.pathInfo = url.$pathinfo; // we want the path without the leading "/" so this is why we do some checking here if (arguments.pathInfo == arguments.scriptName || arguments.pathInfo == "/" || arguments.pathInfo == "") returnValue = ""; else returnValue = Right(arguments.pathInfo, Len(arguments.pathInfo)-1);

That’s it. From here, restart your CFML server and you’re ready to roll. To see my SES URLs in action, head to Ouray Climbing and start clicking some links!

P.S. I did write this post rather quickly, so let me know if you spot any errors or have any issues trying the same thing.

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