Trunkful.com

Serving File Downloads with ColdFusion

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:30:00 -0500

I frequently get asked about providing links to files to be downloaded from ColdFusion websites. Many people will just create a direct link to the file that downloaded such as "myfile.pdf", but by doing it this way you have no control over how the end user's browser is going to access that file. Controlling how the end-users browser accesses the file is very simple with ColdFusion. This can be done in ten lines of code or less. And the benefit of doing it this way is you also mask the location on your file server where your downloaded files are stored. Am I doing it this way you could even place these download files outside of the web root for even greater security. There isn't much to it just three tags; cfSet, cfHeader and cfContent. Create a new file and name it something like filedownload.cfm and copy the code below into that file and save it. The only thing you should have to do is modify the line that has "[ PATH TO YOUR FILES FOR DOWNLOAD ]" by setting the correct folder path. You should be able to test this by modifying the code that would normally have a link to the file and change the link to call this file and pass is the filename of the file to be downloaded. The link would should look like something like this: filedownload.cfm?filename=myfile.pdf.

So what am I doing here?

Checking to make sure a filename was passed and that it exists!
Getting the file size using getFileInfo.
Getting the mime type using a little CF mixed with Java.
Setting the header Content-Disposition. This is critical. By specifying the key word Attachment you will be forcing all browsers to download the file using the default download tool. If you specify 'Inline' you can force the browser to try to display the file inside the browser window. Since Internet Explorer can open many MS Office documents in the browser window you need to specify which you want to happen.
Set the header Expire to now() so the browser will not cache the file.
Specify the length of the content (ie file size) the the browsers download manager can correctly estimate the download time and amount remaining. A nice thing to do for your users when having them download large files.
Delivering the file to the browser using cfContent. This also specifies the file mime type and file name so the browser download manager knows how to handle the file and the name it should use to save the file.

And that is how you should serve up a file to be downloaded using ColdFusion. It's quick and easy.

Get your ColdFusion done here

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:07:00 -0500

Need some ColdFusion coding? Need a CF server installed and configured? Need to figure out why a ColdFusion application or server is crashing? Contact me. I ready for short or long term work and my rates are negotiable. Email me with your ColdFusion needs. My full profile is at linkedIn.com. Thirteen plus years of experience in web application development and over eleven years of ColdFusion development and ColdFusion Server administration experience. Experienced in architecting databases using PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server 2005 and MySQL. Some of the technologies I am proficient in include ColdFusion server 7,8 & 9, CFML, CFC, PostgreSQL server, SQL, MySQL, Linux severs, Apache, XHTML/HTML, CSS, XML, and server administration and installation. Immediately available to do consulting for companies or individuals that need ColdFusion programming or help configuring, tuning or fixing/debugging their ColdFusion server installations. If you need CFML programming or help with your server(s) contact me and we'll talk about what I can do for you. Specialties: ColdFusion programming, ColdFusion server administration, JVM tuning, code tuning, SQL tuning, debugging, consulting, CFML, CFC, programming, ColdFusion Builder, CFEclipse, Linux, Apache, web server administration. Speaking: Presented one hour talks on writing your own ColdFusion Monitoring tools at the Twin Cities ColdFusion User Group and The Online ColdFusion Meetup.

How to CFMAIL Properly and Keep the SPAM in the Can

Thu, 27 May 2010 02:30:00 -0500

One of the most commonly used ColdFusion tags may also be one of the most misused. I say this because of the ColdFusion code that I've seen in production. It appears that a large number people think that all you need to do is open the CFMail tag and type in a to address the from address a subject and then close the tag. And then stuff your email message between the opening and closing tags. People do it this way as this is how they are shown, see the examples below.



Adobe LiveDocs CF7,8,9:


This message was sent by an automatic mailer built with cfmail:
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
#form.body#


Common blog example found via a typical Google search:


Email Message

While both examples are technically correct and will send an email from your ColdFusion server they all lack what most people are trying to achieve in sending HTML formatted/pretty email messages and messages with attachments. There are precise ways in which the RFC (RFC-822) standard for sending e-mails dictates that these are to be done and ColdFusion allows you to follow the standard exactly. You just need to know how. I am not going to bore you with the RFC standard details, however if you are suffering from insomnia feel free to read them. What I will show you is how to send an HTML formatted email with the proper email message parts and optional file attachments so that it will safely pass most if not all SPAM filter tests and will render properly in mail clients. The above code would generate email that looked like this when you examine the raw email source.



Return-Path: 
Delivered-To: myaddress@mydomain.com
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.4 (2008-01-01) on
	mail.mymailserver.com
X-Spam-Level: **
X-Spam-Status: No, score=2.8 required=5.0 tests=HTML_MESSAGE,
	HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG,MIME_HTML_ONLY,RDNS_NONE autolearn=no version=3.2.4
Message-ID: <1331187905.1191260207349870.JavaMail.root@mail.mymailserver.com>
Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 11:35:39 -0600 (CST)
From: John Doe 
Reply-To: some_address@somedomain.com
To: myaddress@mydomain.com
Subject: Hows life
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

John Doe,



Just wondering how things are going.

Looks good, right? However, there are some issues. There are HTML tags in the body of the message, but there is no text portion of the message. If you notice the header information you will see an item for X-Spam-Status and this indicates a score of 2.8. This score was not high enough yet to dictate that this was SPAM according to this SPAM servers rules (on other email servers it might get flagged as SPAM), but you will notice that the items it flagged were almost all HTML related items such as HTML only. In order to reduce the SPAM score you need to properly format your email messages. [More]

Thanks Alagad

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:29:00 -0500

The wonderful folks at Alagad had a promotional give away of three Wenger SwissGear backpacks to help promote TaskForce at CF.Objective(). I won one of them! WooWoo! Thanks Alagad!

ColdFusion Builder Bug 82358 Fixed

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:39:00 -0500

I just received an email from the ColdFusion Builder developers informing me that a bug I entered (bug# 82358) is fixed. As the snippet of the email below shows the bug fix is in Updater 1. I hope the Updater comes out before the end of my Trial Period. Because I was a beta tester and had the Release Candidate installed I only have 21 days left on my trial version. I hope the fix was not just increasing the memory allocation in the cfbuilder.ini file. I tried that in the past on Adobe developer recommendations and proved it didn't help. I do also disagree with the "Easy workaround" since my workaround was to use CFEclipse. Anyways, this is good news because this was one of the main issues I wasn't going to buy ColdFusion Builder. I really want to test this now! [More]

Migrating to ColdFusion Builder from CFEclipse

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:01:00 -0500

Many people have been using CFEclipse for several years now and are now migrating to ColdFusion Builder. Since both are Eclipse based products this is pretty simple, but there are a few things that will not migrate without manual intervention. First start with installing ColdFusion Builder. (See this.) Next lets import your CFEclipse Projects. You can do this and it is easy since it is really an Eclipse feature not specific to any add-ons. Right click in the Navigator view and choose "Import". The windows that opens give you many options for what to import. You are going to click and expand the "General" folder and then choose "Existing Projects into a Workspace" and click the Next Button. If you are using an SVN and you plan to use an Eclipse SVN plug-in in ColdFusion Builder install that plug in before importing your projects, the import process will automatically reconnect the imported projects to your SVN(s). You will also want to configure the SVN plug-in to access all repositories before you run the imports. [More]

Adobe ColdFusion Builder Released

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:56:00 -0500

Today Adobe released ColdFusion Builder 1.0. It's been a long time coming and a lot of people have been patiently waiting for this day. Unfortunately Adobe should have waited longer and fixed more of the outstanding bugs and painful performance issues. Then to add to the insult, the price was set at $299 but that does include Flash Builder 4 Standard. However, I still find it way too high of a price for a product that does NOT measure up. As others will note Flash Builder 4 Standard cost $249 so essentially you are paying $50 for ColdFusion Builder. This is great if you wanted to buy Flash Builder. Many of us never touch Flash so this is not much of a bargain. Then there are performance issues. ColdFusion Builder is painfully slow when it comes to rebuilding project workspaces. It works fine for little projects, but serious enterprise level web applications with thousands of files and folders, such as what I work on, ColdFusion Builder is just slow or worse yet if just fails and throws errors. I've recorded this as a bug and nothing has been done about the problem as far as I can tell. [More]

CFUnited Voting for Topics Ending Today

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:00:00 -0500

This is another shameless plug by someone wanting to be a speaker at CFUnited. In case you haven't been following #CFUnited on Twitter voting for CFUnited topics ends today February 12. I have submitted my Homebrewed ColdFusion Monitoring presentation as a topic. If I get enough votes I will teach you how to write your own ColdFusion based monitoring tools so you can monitor your ColdFusion servers. So head on over to the CFUnited website and cast your votes I hope to see you there.

** UPDATE **

Vote has been extended to February 20th - so get over there and vote... for me ;-)

Adobe ColdFusion Builder Beta 3 Released

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:35:00 -0500

Adobe Labs has released ColdFusion Builder Public Beta 3. One of the first things you will notice is they upgraded the code version of Eclipse to 3.5.1 Galileo. For me this was good news since in my normal Eclipse build I’ve switched from the Subclipse plug-in to Subversive which is now part of the Eclipse project, as my SVN client. All you need to do is add the Galileo Update Site (http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo). Then select Collaboration --> Subversive SVN Team Provider. You can also choose to select the Subversive SVN Integration for the Mylyn Project at the same time.

If you read the docs, and I really suggest you do, you will notice Adobe also added full AIR development support.

I’ve also noticed a fair amount of improvement in the startup time on both my Mac and my pathetic Windows computer at work.

Also new in Beta 3 is the Adobe Community Help AIR application Beta. Select Help --> ColdFusion Builder Help to launch the AIR application. In addition to being able to search the local help documents it appears this is an AIR application that is a proxy to Adobe LiveDocs and ColdFusion Blogs that are aggregated via Adobe Feeds (http://feeds.adobe.com/) including my blog. The search interface automatically brings up related content from the Adobe help docs and blogs. This makes it much easier to search on a general topic rather than just searching for various CF tags or functions.

So far Beta 3 is looking pretty good. There are still bugs and you can report the bugs you find using the public bug tracker http://cfbugs.adobe.com/bugreport/flexbugui/cfbugtracker/main.html.

That's all for now.

Homebrewed ColdFusion Monitor Presentation Files

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:01:00 -0500

Recently I presented Homebrewed ColdFusion Monitoring to the Twin Cities CFUG and to the Online ColdFusion Meetup. Both presentations went well and I've been asked to post my slides and example code.

Attached to this post is a zip file that contains a PDF version of my slides and the example code plus the CFC I'm using to make a full featured monitoring application. Please note that the code is for CF9 Enterprise. There may be some things that won't work in earlier versions of CF or the standard edition of CF.

The recording for my live presentation is at http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p34004904/

Enjoy and watch RIAForge. I am planning to release this application to the ColdFusion Community for collaborative development.

Thank you to all that attended the presentations and for your wonderful feedback.

Wil

*UPDATE* - I just uploaded a new zip file with corrected code that actually works this time.

Homebrewed ColdFusion Monitoring at the Online ColdFusion Meetup

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:02:00 -0500

I am excited to announce that I've been invited to speak on December 10th at 6pm CST about writing your own ColdFusion monitoring tools at the Online ColdFusion Meetup that is run by Charlie Arehart. Below is part of the announcement and links to the Meetup site and meeting URL. If you missed the presentation I gave at the TwinCites CFUG or just want to see it again, please join us for this Meetup.

Thank you,

Wil

What: "Homebrewed ColdFusion Monitoring ", with Wil Genovese
WHEN: Thurs. Dec 10, 6:00pm US ET (UTC/GMT-5)
MEETING URL: http://experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup/
DURATION: Approx. 1 hour
Meeting will be recorded. URL will be posted after meeting at http://recordings.coldfusionmeetup.com
What time is the meeting in your timezone? (shows the time as US ET, and you can choose your city from the list offered to see what time that is in your own timezone)
[More]

RegEx IP Address Validation

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:38:00 -0500

RegEx IP Address Validation

I recently had a project at work where I had to add in some strict IP Address validation and restrictions. We are being required to prevent end users from entering certain IP addresses or ranges. This is a perfect task for Regular Expressions. I am not an expert in RegEx, but I can get out basic RegEx expressions. The first thing I did was search around the net to see if there were expressions already done for IP addresses. There are, but not entirely what I needed. The best I could find were expressions to validate the IP address to ensure it is valid. I didn't find anything to test for certain ranges of IP Addresses. Since I can hack at RegEx a bit I took the expression I found to validate the IP address and made modifications to do the tests I needed. These are the Regular Expressions I hacked up to do the validation and restrictions.

We were required to block these IP addresses or ranges.


0.0.0.0
127.0.0.1
255.255.255.255
10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255

[More]

Homebrewed ColdFusion Monitor at Twin Cities CFUG

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:04:00 -0500

Sitting at Chris & Rob's Chicago's Taste Authority in St. Paul, MN sipping a Goose Island 312 wheat beer, eating a couple of Chicago dogs and preparing my presentation for Homebrewed ColdFusion Monitoring. I am happy to say the Twin Cities ColdFusion User Group (http://www.colderfusion.com) has asked me to talk about the ColdFusion Monitoring tools I've written and use at work. I've just accepted their invitation to present and I hope to see you there.

I will be updating these tools for ColdFusion 9 and I hope to have a basic standalone app ready to go by the time I give my presentation. (The version I wrote for work is custom for our servers and not portable.)

The Twin Cities CFUG meets the first Wednesday of every month. This meeting will be on November 4th at 6:30 pm with pizza and socializing at 6:00pm.

See you there!

ColdFusion 9 on Snow Leopard

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:38:00 -0500

Recently I posted about upgrading my Mac Book Pro to Snow Leopard and then getting my already installed ColdFusion 8 running again. I basically had to reconnect CF8 to Apache and reconfigure my Apache settings since the Snow Leopard upgrade wiped them out.

Many people had problems or could not even install CF8 on Snow Leopard. The installer didn't even run for many people. Since then Adobe has released ColdFusion 9. It's shiny and new and oh so fast. So at last weeks Twin Cities CFUG (http://www.colderfusion.com) I uninstalled CF8 and installed CF9.

It was pretty straight forward with no issues other than me entering the wrong web root path (doh!). I downloaded the OSX 64 bit version and ran the installer.

I chose to install the Developer Edition and I chose to use the J2EE installation method. I also opted not to install the component to connect CF9 to OpenOffice. I use OpenOffice all the time, but I absolutely refuse to install desktop software on production servers. I don't plan to use any of those features. Sorry Adobe, you're just going to have to find a better way to implement creation and reading of office documents.

That's all really. Enjoy ColdFusion 9 on Snow Leopard

ColdFusion 8 Server on Snow Leopard

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:46:00 -0500

Last night I upgraded my MacBook Pro from Leopard to Snow Leopard. I used the upgrade method instead of the clean install. So far I cannot tell that anything is different. This really does look and feel like an under the hood upgrade. At this point I have not dug into Snow Leopard UI changes, but I have been testing software.

I've had ColdFusion 8 server Developer edition installed on my MacBook Pro for a long time. After running the Snow Leopard upgrade ColdFusion server started just fine, but it was no longer connected to my Apache installation. I did remember to backup my httpd-vhosts.conf file, but I neglected to backup the main httpd.conf file. A nice side note is my /etc/hosts file was preserved by the Snow Leopard upgrade, but I was prepared with a back up just in case.

So I had to replace my httpd-vhosts.conf file with my backup copy. Once Apache restarted I was able to access my web root which is also my ColdFusion Builder / CFEclipse workspace folder. However, as feared ColdFusion server is no longer connected to Apache.

So I started searching the web to figure out how to reconnect ColdFusion server to Apache. A big thanks to Geoff Bowers at the daemonite blog for a detailed blog post with step by step instructions. The step that starts with “Open a terminal window and compile a new JRun "web connector". Type in the following verbatim, each point on its own line (hitting enter after each line):” is the step where I started in order to get ColdFusion reconnected to Apache.

Note: I already had Xcode installed due to my use of MacPorts and PostgreSQL. If you do not already have Xcode installed you will need to do that before following the instructions to compile the Apache connector. You can find the new Xcode installation package on the Snow Leopard DVD. This will save you from the 1Gb download.

I tried the manual restarts like they did with no luck and I actually had to completely reboot my MacBook Pro to complete the process. Upon reboot my ColdFusion Administrator was working and my local CF code was working. A huge plus with getting ColdFusion working this way is that all my settings, mappings, datasources etc were saved. If you do have to reinstall ColdFusion from scratch you should copy the neo-datasource.xml and neo-runtime.xml files so you can restore your settings.

Happy ColdFusioning on Snow Leopard!