Sagar Ganatra's Blog

There are a couple of variables that have been introduced in Application.cfc which are REST specific. These are this.restsettings.cfclocation and this.restsettings.skipCFCWithError . If you have a list of directories containing REST enabled CFCs then you can specify the same in the variable this.restsettings.cfclocation. At the time of registration, the specified directories and its subdirectories will be scanned for REST enabled CFCs and then deployed. If any of these CFCs contain compilation errors then an error is thrown and the registration would fail. To tackle this another variable this.restsettings.skipCFCWithError is provided. When set to true, the CFCs with compilation errors would be skipped. Only those without any compilation errors would be deployed successfully.

Today, I wrote a post on the new lifecycle method - ‘onAbort’, which can be defined in an Applicaiton.cfc file . It is invoked when the cfabort tag is executed. David Boyer , asked me whether the onRequestEnd method is also invoked on executing the cfabort tag. In CF 9.0.1 it did invoke the onRequestEnd method. See Ben’s post: http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2221-CFAbort-And-OnRequestEnd-Behavior-In-ColdFusion-8-And-ColdFusion-9.htm Now in CF 10, this behavior has changed. The onRequestEnd method is no longer invoked when cfabort, cflocation or cfcontent tag is executed. The onAbort handler method defined in Application.cfc file would be invoked on executing these tags. Also, the onRequestEnd method would not be invoked even if the abort handler(onAbort) is not defined in Application.cfc.

I was experimenting with a new method 'onAbort' introduced in ColdFuion 10 which can be defined in an Application.cfc file. This method is invoked when cfabort is called. What if showerror attribute is also present in the cfabort tag? Would it still invoke the onAbort method and then onError? The onAbort method would be ignored and the onError method would be invoked. Even in a case wherein the onError method is not defined in Application.cfc, the onAbort method wouldn't be invoked. In this case the error message would be shown on the standard error template.

There are various complex types in ColdFusion – Array, Struct, Query. When a REST service in ColdFusion returns one of these complex types, it has to be serialized to either JSON or XML format. As explained in my previous post , the HTTP protocol can be used in content type negotiation. You can specify the desired content type either by specifying it at the end of the URL or in the Accept header of HTTP request. In this post, I’ll explain the format in which the complex types are returned from a ColdFusion REST service.

Prior to ColdFusion 10, to write or append to a file one had to specify the file content in the output attribute of CFFILE tag. In ColdFusion 10, you can specify the file content in the body of the cffile tag. In cases where the file content is specified in body as well as in the output attribute, the output attribute would be ignored.

In ColdFusion 10, you can now show the users location on a Google map created with the CFMAP tag. The CFMAP and CFMAPITEM tags now have a boolean attribute showuser . When set to true the browser would ask for the users permission and then display users geo-location on the map. This is now supported in most of the modern browsers. In cases where the browser doesn’t support Geo-location API then the values provided in centeraddress or centerlatitude\centerlongitude attributes will be used to add a marker in the Google map.

Following with my previous post on how content negotiation between the client and server help in invoking an appropriate REST service. In this post I’ll explain how one can specify multiple mime types in the request header and also the quality factor that enables server to decide which mime type to serve for the incoming request. The client sends a HTTP request to the Server along with several headers, one of them is the Accept header. The Accept header can contain a list of mime types that the client (user agent) is willing to process. These mime types are separated by a comma and may optionally be combined with the quality factor. A CFC can contain several methods with produces attribute set to a specific mime type. The Accept header may contain several mime types: text/html, text/plain, application/xml, application/json, */* Server would parse the Accept header and will search for a REST service that matches the mime type specified first in the Accept header list. In this cas...

The HTTP protocol provides a Content negotiation mechanism using which different formats of the document can be served using the same URI. For example, a JavaScript application can request the content in JSON format and an external system say a Java client can request for the same content in XML format. Here the clients need to specify the content format in the Accept attribute of the HTTP request. The REST service can specify the format in which the data will be returned to the client in ‘produces’ attribute.

As mentioned in my earlier post there are various ways in which data can passed to a REST service. The cfargument tag has a new attribute restargsource, it can take one of these values – path, query, matrix, form, cookie and header.

In my previous post, I’d explained how REST services can be created, published and accessed in ColdFusion 10 . Andy , asked me “Is there any way to avoid having the /rest/restapp/ in the URL?”. In short Yes. ‘rest’ in the URL lets the ColdFusion Server know that the incoming request is for a REST service. As mentioned in my previous post, you can update the servlet mapping defined in web.xml located at cfusion_home\wwwroot\WEB-INF directory. But it can't be avoided. Coming to the ‘restapp’ in the URL which indicates the Application name or the Servlet mapping. It can be removed from the URL by placing the CFCs in a default directory. While registering a REST service in the ColdFusion Administrator, there is an option to set the service as a default service, meaning all the CFCs placed in the directory would not require the Application name or Service mapping to be provided in the URL.

In ColdFusion 10, support for creating and publishing REST services has been added. The ColdFusion components can now be made available as REST services and these services can be consumed by various clients. REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It is an architectural style which is based on web standards and HTTP protocol. The idea here is to use HTTP protocol instead of complex mechanisms such as CORBA, RPC or SOAP to connect between the machines. In fact, the World Wide Web which is based on HTTP can be viewed as a REST based architecture.

The queryNew() and queryAddRow() functions are used to create a query data structure and add empty rows to it. To add record sets to the query, function querySetCell() is used. If there are say three columns and you want to add say five rows to the query, then you would have about sixteen lines of code. That's huge and it will increase with number of columns and the number of records that you want to add. In ColdFusion 10 there's a third parameter introduced in queryNew() and queryAddRow() functions. The third parameter can accept either a struct,  an array of structs. Ray Camden had covered this in one of his POTW posts. One feedback that came from one of the ColdFusion users is to use an array or a two dimensional array to initialize or add rows to the query. This has now been implemented and is available in the public beta release. Here’s how it works:

The arrayAppend function in ColdFusion is used to append an element to the end of the array. Now in ColdFusion 10, it is possible to concatenate two arrays using the same arrayAppend function. A third parameter of type boolean is added to the function; when it is set to true the two arrays are concatenated.

After more than 20 months of research, planning, development and keeping  you all in suspense about the next version of ColdFusion, code named  Zeus; I'm finally proud to announce the release of the public beta version of none else than ColdFusion Zeus. You are free to download it here and report bugs here . This release comes with tonnes of new features and enhancements. It not only focuses on HTML5 features but also provides rich features such as RESTful WebServices, Closures, Java Integration, Security enhancements and many more. I wanted to create a picture that depicted all the new features in ColdFusion 10, like I did when public beta of  CFBuilder 2 was released. But I couldn't since its a massive release and capturing everything in one single picture was not possible at all. However, I managed to create an app (like a movie clip) and hence the title 'Now Showing - ColdFusion Zeus'. You can access the app here . Click on the chapters and learn what's ...