Sagar Ganatra's Blog

The for-in loop construct in ColdFusion is generally used to loop over a structure variable. In ColdFusion 10, one can use the same for-in construct to loop over Query and List variables. Here is an example in which the for-in construct is used to loop over Query and List variables.

Yesterday Ben Nadel asked me a question on Twitter, on using filterCriteria when publishing a message on a web socket channel from server side. The method ‘wspublish’ allows you to perform a server side push to a client who has subscribed to a channel. It takes three parameters – channelName, message and filterCriteria. I always assumed that the values present in subscriberInfo and publisherInfo can be compared in Channel Listener functions (canSendMessage, beforePublish etc) before the message can be received by the client. Although this technique is available, what I found after having a discussion with a fellow developer ( Awdhesh ), is that I can specify simple conditions when subscribing or publishing.

In REST everything is treated as a resource and each resource is associated with a URI from which it can be accessed. As mentioned in my series of posts on REST ; in ColdFusion methods defined in a CFC are made RESTful by adding the attributes httpmethod and restpath. The restpath value specified in the method can then be used to access the resource. Although this would serve the given purpose, it would be a good idea to have a root resource resolve a generic URL and then have different methods that resolve other path of the URL.

I was looking into ways in which users can be authenticated before they start to receive or send messages over a WebSocket channel in ColdFusion. I found that there are two ways in which this can be done. The first approach is to call the ' authenticate'  method on the socket object. The other way is to use cflogin to authenticate the user. The authentication level can be taken a step further in various channel listener functions. By implementing these listener functions, some sort business logic can be devised wherein the logged in user with certain credentials can be allowed to subscribe or publish to a channel.

The HTML5 Web Sockets represent the next evolution of web communications. A WebSocket is a full duplex, bidirectional communication channel that operates over a single TCP socket. It has become a standard for building real time web applications. In ColdFusion 10, a messaging layer has been provided that implements the Web Socket protocol. It enables you to build applications that are based on publisher/subscriber model and applications that are based on subscriber model wherein a push from a server is possible.

A very quick post on disabling timeout for the requests. You can now set the requesttimeout to zero in cfsetting tag i.e. <cfsetting requesttimeout=0>

I was working on creating a CRUD application with REST and wanted to retrieve records with a GET request. The GET request would contain the ARTID for which the record has to be retrieved in the URL itself. To do this I had added an argument to the method implementing the GET request with ‘restargsource’ attribute set to path. The URL would be of the form: http://localhost:8500/rest/restapp/artService/getart/1 However, in another scenario I wanted to retrieve all the records from the ART table when there is no ARTID specified in the URI i.e. with the URL: http://localhost:8500/rest/restapp/artService/getart/ PathParams are always required and if they’re not specified then a ‘404 Not found’ error would be thrown. I thought of adding another method to handle this GET request with no PathParams. But, it would have made my code look clumsy and semantically not correct. However, I was able resolve this by providing a regular expression for the PathParam argument.

A quick post on the new function arraySlice added to the list of functions in ColdFusion 10. The arraySlice function is used to  select a part of the array. It takes three arguments – array, offset and length.

In ColdFusion 10, one can restrict the type of file being uploaded to the server when using CFFILE to upload the files. The new attribute accept allows the user to specify various MIME types or extensions of the file that can be accepted by the server. If the user tries to upload a file with a .txt extension but it contains xml data (application/xml MIME type) then the server would accept or throw an exception based on the value specified for the strict attribute. 'strict' is a boolean attribute added to the CFFILE tag. By default it is true and therefore wouldn't allow the user to upload a file whose contents are of different MIME type. When the strict attribute is set to false it would allow the user to upload a file irrespective of its content. However, an error would be thrown if the extension of the file doesn't match the ones specified in the accept attribute.