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Quick Tips for ColdFusion Builder - Console and Tail View

Posted on Mar 30, 2010

I've been using ColdFusion Builder exclusively for my ColdFusion development for months now. Nonetheless, there are still a ton of productivity features that I will admit to only just beginning to utilize. For instance, only recently have I begun to take advantage of the console and tail views. I'm sure someone must have blogged about these before but both are incredibly useful tools that are even more useful when you are doing Ajax and Flex development or working with ColdFusion ORM. Let me explain.

Console View

In order to fully take advantage of the console view, you need to have your server defined in ColdFusion Builder and you must start it from within Builder (if its already running, you can simply restart it in Builder by right-clicking the server and choosing restart). When you start or restart your server in Builder, you will typically see the console view come up in the bottom set of tabs with the console log of the startup process. Typically, since this can be a lot of output, I prefer to clear this to make it easier to find new items output to the console (the "clear console" button is the first one with the little X on it).

At this point, anytime your ColdFusion application has an error or when remoting calls come in or anything else that gets logged to the console, you should have access to the details. This works the same on both Windows and Mac and can offer very useful information. One very important item is when using ColdFusion ORM, if you set the ormsettings.logsql value to true, you will actually see the contents of every ORM query output to the console. This can be invaluable when trying to debug complex ORM issues (or even simple ones).

Tail View

Tail view can sometimes offer similar information to Console View, in that it will show the details of your errors via showing the latest output (i.e. "tail") of your error log. The primary benefit to Tail View is that you can view any one of your ColdFusion server logs. Assuming you started your ColdFusion server from within Builder, your server tab should have a button enabled with a little dropdown (its the seventh button from the left) that will drop down a list of all your ColdFusion logs.

Clicking one of these will open that log in the Tail View which will update real-time as items are written to this log. This can be very helpful when working on remote Ajax calls where the full details and stack trace are not always available to you, you can easily access them in Builder. Not only that, from within the Tail View tab, you can actually choose any log file you want (ColdFusion related or not). So, for instance, you could watch your Apache logs.

Here's another nice item you may not be aware of: if you have ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder installed together (which I recommend), you can add Tail View (or any other of these views like RDS DataView) right into your Flash Builder perspective. This makes it really easy to debug issues with remoting calls as you run your Flex application - getting the full stack trace on errors that may occur within your ColdFusion services.

Comments

Be ware of the jrunsvc.exe bug. It sometimes will hog the CPU and render CF crippled once Tailview & LogSQL is used, until CFBuilder is closed. I've already reported it to Adobe and they've reproduced it.

Posted By Henry Ho / Posted on 03/30/2010 at 11:17 AM

They have released a fix to the software that patches the jrunsvc.exe bug. I installed the patch and havent't had LogSQL lock up on me once.

Posted By bcm software / Posted on 02/08/2011 at 6:45 AM