Viewing by month: November 2006
SWFUpload Flash-based Form Upload Tool
Posted on Nov 17, 2006
Geoff Stearns of deconcept has just posted about a new tool that uses his awesome swfObject to create a Flash-based form file upload tool called swfUpload. There is a demo on the homepage and it appears to work very nicely. Since it triggers functions on start, cancel, progress and complete, I assume you could use something like ajaxCFC to trigger CF processes that might be required to process the file after upload. Another nice feature is that if the user has Flash or JavaScript disabled, the tool degrades nicely into a standard HTML file upload field.
Processing Uploaded Files Asynchronously with Status Updates Using AjaxCFC
Posted on Nov 16, 2006
I was presented with a problem for a recent project. A user would be able to upload a file at which point it would be processed with the results of the processing to be presented to the end user on the screen. This sounds simple, the problem was that the processing could be lengthy, and if it occurred in conjunction with the upload, the user would be waiting for the response page to load and left wondering what happened to their file (and might be tempted to hit back or refresh). So, what I wanted to do was find a way to let the user know we got the file and then to update them on the status of the processing so that they know something is occurring. I was able to accomplish this quite simply using Rob Gonda's AjaxCFC. Keep in mind, this code was a proof of concept and doesn't reflect best practices in all aspects (and I am also very happy to hear if someone has another solution).
FTPCFC - Component Wrapper for CFFTP Functions
Posted on Nov 14, 2006
So I recently had the need to use cfftp functionality and decided to write a component wrapper for the functionality. The component (which can be downloaded via the download link below) wraps all the functions available in cfftp, making you code easier to read and far less verbose. It also handles some basic logic for you to further simplify some of the functions. I tested against a couple of connections and it worked nicely (with one exception I will discuss in a bit), however it doesn't support things like transferMode, passive or proxyServer at this point in time.
Bizarre Query Data Type Errors
Posted on Nov 14, 2006
Here is an interesting problem I recently ran into recently. The application I was building required me to run a stored procedure multiple times and append query data together into a single big query (I won't get into the why's here). One would think this could be done using a query of query and a UNION join, but while this worked, it came back out of order. In my case, the data needed to be appended in the order it was received as there was no independent means of properly ordering the data (ok, so maybe this is an obscure issue, but it brought a slightly less obscure one to light). To solve this, I wrote a queryAppend function that simple loops through one query and appends them row by row to another...this is where some funny stuff started happening.
ColdFusion Open-Source Update - November 13
Posted on Nov 13, 2006
Two new projects this week (well at least new to me) and several important updates.