Sagar Ganatra's Blog

Yesterday at the ColdFusion Developer Week, I had demonstrated the Productivity features in ColdFusion Builder. Here is a cloud of these features: 

The Editor is the most important feature in an IDE and the code assist features in the Editor helps in developing applications quickly and hence help in increasing the productivity. One of features is the 'auto insertion of tag attributes'. Most of the tags in ColdFusion have a mandatory attribute, for example the attribute 'name' is mandatory when using the cffunction tag. In ColdFusion Builder 2, these attributes are auto inserted i.e. when a user types in the cffunction tag and invokes code assist (using CTRL + SPACE) the name attribute is auto inserted. auto insertion also works for function arguments wherein the required arguments are auto inserted. Auto Insertion of Tag attributes As explained above, the mandatory attributes are auto inserted whenever the code assist is invoked for tags such as cffunction : In the above picture, code assist for cffunction is invoked and the tag is selected from the list. This would auto insert the required attribute 'name'...

Do you spend a lot of  time scrolling large files, just to find out the next function definition in place or to figure out the end\start of a tag? If your answer is YES, then why don’t you try the Navigation enhancements in ColdFusion Builder 2.0? ColdFusion Builder comes to you with three types of Navigation enhancements: -          Code Navigation -          Smart Tab Navigation -          Jumping to matching tag. Code Navigation Code Navigation is all about navigating to the next function definition in place. Imagine a CFC containing various cffunction tags. It is a time-consuming task to keep scrolling and keep an eye on the file to get to the next cffunction tag. ColdFusion Builder 2.0 provides a shortcut key CTRL + SHIFT + DOWN to navigate to the next function definition. And to navigate to the previous function definition, you can use the shortcut CTRL +...

Tag search is that one powerful feature in ColdFusion Builder 2.0 which allows you to search for tags that match some criteria. Also, there are various actions that the user can perform once the tag is found. Actions such as  'Replacing the tag block' with some text,  'Removing the Tag block',   'Setting an attribute',   'Removing an attribute',  'Adding text before the tag block' and  'Adding text after the tag block'.  In this post I'll explain how these actions can help you increase your productivity in your day to day application development. Action - Setting an attribute Consider a use-case where you would like your ColdFusion application to be available to other web clients such as a HTML client or a FLEX client. In these cases you will have to update the cffunction's  access attribute to remote.  Updating each and every function definition can be a time consuming task. With the action Set attribute  one can specify the attr...

In my last post I have explained about keyboard shortcuts in ColdFusion Builder 2.0. This blog post contains a list of all shortcut keys and I have listed these keyboard shortcuts based on the categories that it falls into. Well, this post was not planned since users can easily get to know the keyboard shortcuts by navigating to the preferences (ColdFusion -> Profiles -> Keys). However, I met Joshua at Scotch on the rocks in Edinburgh and he suggested that it would be nice to have the list of keyboard shortcuts handy. So this post is for those who would like to have the list with them and refer it whenever required. Keyboard shortcuts for inserting text: These are the keyboard shortcuts which are used to insert some text into the editor: Command Keyboard shortcuts on Windows Keyboard shortcuts on Mac Insert anchor tag CTRL + T, L CMD + T, L Insert bold tag CTRL + T, B CMD + T, B Insert br tag CTRL + T, R CMD + T, R Insert cfabort CTRL + T, A CMD + T, A Insert...

ColdFuison Builder 2.0 is all about productivity, it has introduced a lot of keyboard shortcuts, about 42 of them. Shortcuts have been provided for inserting text, invoking wizards, shortcuts for all new editor features and shortcuts for Extensions. Want to define a keyboard shortcut for a piece of code? Possible. Not only that, you can also Export and Import the keyboard shortcuts, so that you need not redo the task of defining a list of keyboard shortcuts on a different installation. What comes with ColdFusion Builder 2.0? You get 42 keyboard shortcuts and I know remembering all of these 42 keyboard shortcuts seems to be a daunting task, but the way these keyboard shortcuts have been designed doesn't require you to remember each and every shortcut. The keyboard shortcuts have been grouped into three categories: Insert options, Wizard options and the Extensions options. Each of these categories start with a key combination. For example the Insert options start with CTRL + T and wh...

Quick Fix is another interesting feature introduced in ColdFusion Builder 2.0. The CFML Editor now provides corrections to the problems found in the file that you are editing. The Editor tries to resolve the CFCs specified at various places i.e. in createObject function, the new operator or the ones specified in the tags cfinvoke\cfobject. The Editor also tries to resolve the functions using CFC introspection. Now if you have declared a CFC or a function which doesn't exist, then the CFML Editor instead of showing an error in document provides Quick Fix suggestions. Quick fix suggestions for components: As shown in picture above, the CFML Editor was not able to resolve the component 'Component1' and instead of showing an error, the Editor has shown a yellow marker indicating that a quick fix suggestion is available. On clicking the yellow marker, a list containing suggestions are shown. On selecting the first suggestion, the component will be created in the same directory ...

ColdFusion Builder 2 (codenamed 'Storm') the next version of ColdFusion Builder is now public beta and it comes packed with several new features. One of the highlights of this release is the ColdFusion specific Search and Replace feature; CFB is an Eclipse based IDE and the search\replace functionality provided in the 1.0 version of the product (codenamed 'Bolt') used the Eclipse's search and replace functionality. Storm now comes with a separate engine for Search and Replace. One can search not only for text but also tags based on the conditions that you specify. The search scope is now widened and users can search over various scopes such as Open documents , Projects , Workingset ,  Workspace , Local directory , Selected Resources and over any of your FTP\RDS connections . And that's not it, you can also perform certain actions on the matches found. In this post I'll be providing an overview and will try to deliver more complex scenarios in the comi...

ColdFusion Builder - Storm is public beta and you can download Storm from labs.adobe.com. I just completed my session at SOTR and all the new features are on the picture below:

The title says it all. I will be speaking at Scotch on the Rocks (SOTR) conference to be held at Edinburgh, Scotland on March 3rd and 4th 2011. I will talking about the next version of ColdFusion Builder codenamed Storm. The speakers and sessions were announced a month back and I must say the session topics look very impressive. Of course there will be sessions on ColdFusion and related technologies, but one would also get to know more about HTML5, Regular expressions, Software Requirements etc,. This is going to be my first ever ColdFusion conference and I'm very excited.

ColdFusion Builder sometimes might take a lot of time during startup or when a large project is imported into workspace. This post explains how one can change Builder settings to improve the startup experience. Server settings: If you have added a server to CFB, then you can see at the bottom right corner of the IDE that the CFCs are getting indexed. CFB uses the server settings to provide code assist for datasources, CFCs. This might take a lot of time since it indexes all the files in the webroot. This setting can be disabled in the preferences section. Navigate to Window -> Preferences -> ColdFusion -> Server Settings. Mac users can find Preferences under Adobe ColdFusion Builder (standalone) or under Eclipse (plugin installation). CFB indexes all the CFCs located under webroot and mappings directory for the servers defined. By default these options are checked. One can uncheck 'Build server settings' and can observe that the build is not initiated when the CFB is...

ColdFusion Builder is a brand new IDE from Adobe for building ColdFusion applications. ColdFusion Builder is based on Eclipse and can be downloaded from  http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/buy/#cfb . In this series I will be explaining about creating Projects/Applications in ColdFusion Builder. CF Builder provides wizards for creating projects. It also provides wizards for creating CFCs, CFMs and CF Interfaces. I would like to cover the latter in the next post. In this post I will be explaining the project creation with CF Builder. To get started with creating Projects switch to ColdFusion perspective. The project creation wizard can be invoked from four places: Start page -> ColdFusion project. File -> New -> ColdFusion project Clicking New ColdFusion project Icon on the toolbar. Right click Navigator view and select New -> ColdFusion Project. The 'New ColdFusion project' page is as shown below: Enter your 'Project Name' as say 'ProjectTest'. ...