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Archive for the ‘ColdFusion/Railo & MySQL’ Category

ColdFusion pagination with next, previous and numbers

Friday, March 12th, 2010

One of the main things all developers come to in applications is pagination and the best way we found to do this is by Raymond Camden which covers how to create next and previous buttons for your content using the URL variable.

As we have extended what Raymond Camden has done we will go through all the code again to make sure you get the full picture.

First part is to get our data, which most of the time will be a database or as the second data example shows a queryNew which is a way of creating data in a query format without the need of a database query.

<cfquery name=”data” datasource=”data_dsn”>
SELECT *
FROM data
</cfquery>

OR

<cfset data = queryNew(“id,name,age,active”,”integer,varchar,integer,bit”)>

<cfloop index=”x” from=”1″ to=”22″>
<cfset queryAddRow(data)>
<cfset querySetCell(data,”id”,x)>
<cfset querySetCell(data,”name”,”User #x#”)>
<cfset querySetCell(data,”age”,randRange(20,90))>
<cfset querySetCell(data,”active”,false)>
</cfloop>

Next we want to set the number of records per page we would like to show, for this example code we are using 10:

<cfset perpage = 10>

Now we create the code for the URL variables which counts the records in the data we have got from our database / query. We also set the default of the variable URL.start to 1 as we want to start from the first record and not 0.

<cfparam name=”url.start” default=”1″>

<cfif not isNumeric(url.start) or url.start lt 1 or url.start gt data.recordCount or round(url.start) neq url.start>
<cfset url.start = 1>
</cfif>

The output of the data, you will notice on our <cfoutput> tag we have startrow & maxrows which sets what records are displayed.

<cfoutput query=”data” startrow=”#url.start#” maxrows=”#perpage#”>
#currentrow#) #name#<br />
</cfoutput>

And now this is when the code that Raymond Camden created changes a little to add in a new feature, page numbering. We first have a previous link which has an if statement around it to see if its a link or not and enable the <a> tag or have no link on it. This can be done different ways but to keep with Raymond Camden’s code we will leave it as it is. Now the new part you can see within the commented area (<!— Start Page Number —> CODE <!— End Page Number —>) we set 2 variables one for a page count as we need to have a number of pages that will be listed. The next one is page link, this is to fit in with the rest of the code and add the number that will need to be added within the link to view the numbered page. Next is a loop to go through the number of pages with the link and a small bit of VERY simple maths to add up the next page through the loop.

<p align=”center”>

[

<cfif url.start gt 1>

<cfset link = cgi.script_name & "?start=" & (url.start - perpage)>

<cfoutput><a href="#link#">Previous Page</a></cfoutput>

<cfelse>

Previous Page

</cfif>

/

<!--- Start Page Number --->

<cfset pageCount = 1>

<cfset pageLink = 1>

<cfset totalPages = Ceiling(rs_getReports.recordCount / perpage)>

<cfloop index="c" from="1" to="#totalPages#">

<cfoutput>

<a href="?start=#pageLink#">#pageCount#</a>

</cfoutput>

<cfset pageCount = pageCount + 1>

<cfset pageLink = pageLink + perpage>

</cfloop>

<!--- End Page Number --->

/

<cfif (url.start + perpage - 1) lt rs_getReports.recordCount>

<cfset link = cgi.script_name & "?start=" & (url.start + perpage)>

<cfoutput><a href="#link#">Next Page</a></cfoutput>

<cfelse>

Next Page

</cfif>

]

</p>

Thats it, you will now have something that looks like this:

Paging

Base code taken from Raymond Camden’s coldfusionjedi.com :

http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2006/4/24/ColdFusion-and-Pagination

Polar CMS in alpha testing

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

After 3 months of development first staging of the Polar CMS script has been released to our testers / designers to start playing with.

Process of our testing

  • Running the install program to setup the databases and user accounts
  • Use the basic functions of the CMS:
    - Add pages
    - Add page elements to change
    - Use the WYSIWYG editor
    - Apply code to front end site to test speeds
  • Consult with development team to see how things can be improved

Next steps

  • Design second simple admin template / style sheet for simple viewing (Less images / design factor)
  • Develop modules system ready for alpha testing as this is still in development as one of the main features of the systems
  • Speed & load testing to make sure the script uses the smallest amount of CPU

We will be updating the Polar CMS website soon with some of this information. Also a new website will be released soon.

Visit polarcms.com

Using ColdFusion Custom Tags (cf_)

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

A new part of ColdFusion our development team has been looking into more is the custom tags (cf_). Soon to be used with the Polar CMS (Visit official site), custom tags allow you to have scripts and coding within a tag that can be called from a cfm page as shown below:

<!— CFM Page (cfcustomtag_caller.cfm)—>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
<title>Call Tag</title>
</head>

<body>
<cf_cfcustomtag customVar=”test”>
<p>SOME HTML</p>
<cf_cfcustomtag form=”testFormCode”>
</body>
</html>

As you can see we are using a new tag <cf_cfcustomtag> with custom variables (customVar=”test”). These variables can be picked up within our custom tag cfm file we are about to create.

<!— CFM Page (cfcustomtag.cfm)—>
<cfoutput>
<cfif isDefined(“ATTRIBUTES.customVar”)>
<h1>#Now()#</h1>
<p>#ATTRIBUTES.customVar#</p>
</cfif>
<cfif isDefined(“ATTRIBUTES.form”)>
<p>#ATTRIBUTES.form#</p>
</cfif>
</cfoutput>

The above is a simple CFM file which has HTML and ColdFusion code. As you will notice we have named the file ‘cfcustomtag.cfm’ which is the same name as the tag: <cf_cfcustomtag> just without the cf_ at the start. Coldfusion will look for any files with the same naming tag.

You may ask why not use a <cfinclude> tag, but with cfincludes they can be slower and you are not able to reuse the cfinclude as easy as a cf_ custom tag. With custom tags you can lower the amount of code you need by using the extra variables (ATTRIBUTES).

Hope you enjoy using custom cf_ tags. Feel free to comment and add your code to show better ways of using cf_ tags. You may also want to research <cfmodule> tags.

Coldfusion DateFormat

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

The Coldfusion dateformat works in the same sort of fashion as the ASP.NET and the PHP date time function. As our team mainly works in Coldfusion we can expand alot more on this function that ASP.NET / PHP.

The code: (Use this code within a <cfoutput></cfoutput> tag)

#DateFormat(Now(), "YYYY")#

About the code:

As you can see all we start with DateFormat which states will want to have a date format (You can use TimeFormat to work with times). Next we are getting the current date with the Now() and then we have the formatting of the date, as we only want the year we are using ‘YYYY’ (Displays: 2009) or you can use ‘YY’ (Displays: 09)

Enjoy!

Detecting iPhone, Blackberry etc using ColdFusion

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Many of our clients have been asking about detecting if a user is using a blackberry or iPhone etc to view their website and redirect to a mobile version of their websites. Well we have put together a little bit of code to do this:

Code example:

<cfif findNoCase('blackberry', CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT)>
<cflocation url="http://blackberry.yourdomain.com" addtoken="no">
<cfelseif findNoCase('iphone', CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT)>
<cflocation url="http://iphone.yourdomain.com" addtoken="no">
<cfelseif CGI.HTTP_ACCEPT CONTAINS "text/vnd.wap.wml">
<cflocation url="http://wap.yourdomain.com" addtoken="no">
</cfif>

Hope you enjoy this code snippet.

Using Coldfusion tag: CFFEED

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Using the ‘cffeed’ allows you to read any websites RSS feed and display it within your coldfusion page. The ‘cffeed’ tag is a very easy tag to use and can be very handy when building a RSS display website.

Code to be placed at the top of .cfm page:

<cffeed action=”read” source=”http://www.hostmediauk.com/blog/?feed=rss2″ name=”myRSSFeed”>

Code to be placed within the <body> tags:

<cfloop from=”1″ to=”#ArrayLen(myRSSFeed.item)#” index=”i”>

<cfoutput>
#myRSSFeed.item[i].description.value#<br />
</cfoutput>

</cfloop>

You can view this working on our Coldfusion 8 servers in the UK at:
http://www.hostcoldfusion.co.uk/

Enjoy using RSS feeds on your website.

Windows ColdFusion and ASP Hosting

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Today we have lauched our Windows servers with ColdFusion MX7 and ASP/ASP.NET for advanced application built. As well as unlimited MySQL database you will be able to use unlimited MSSQL 2005 databases to further your applications and websites.

Using Helm 3.2 you can manage your entire website from this great feature packed control panel.

We have built 3 web hosting packages with prices start from £10 per year and £2 per month. As many other companies have done with ColdFusion hosting is limit you on hosting space and bandwidth but we are providing the same as we have done with our Linux hosting ranging from 1GB hosting space and 10GB bandwidth to 10GB hosting space to 100GB bandwidth.

We hope you enjoy our new Windows servers, if you have any questions please use the contact form or open a support ticket.

Having problems with not working with images

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

When working with some of our clients on windows servers we have noticed Coldfusion has some problems when working with images for cfdocument. The Coldfusion shows a 60 second time out error.

We found out that it was due to the image location as Coldfusion appears to pull all the files onto is main application so full fold paths are required.

Normally using:

<img src=”/images/image.jpg”/>

Instead of using the HTTP you need to use the file system path:

<img src=”file:///C:\drivefolder\wwwroot\sitename\images\image.jpg“/>

This corrects the issues with Coldfusion 7+ (Problem still in CF 8).

[Tutorial] Coldfusion Detect mobile device

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
Coldfusion Detect mobile device

This code detects if the browsing media is a mobile/wap device and redirects to a new directory.

Quote:
<CFIF CGI.HTTP_ACCEPT CONTAINS “text/vnd.wap.wml”>
<CFLOCATION URL=”/wap/index.cfm”>
</CFIF>

NOTE: This is untested but I have seen this code used on live projects.