Pete Frietag has been blogging about a lot of great new features of ColdFusion MX 7 that haven't received much hype. I had missed many of these. I highly recommend that you read up on the new features if you are getting (or thinking about getting) ColdFusion MX 7.
I mentioned in a previous blog entry that I had a site (Oklahoma Medical Reserve Corps) that is XHTML 1.0 Strict and can also be served up in MS Word. As I mentioned in that entry, the two unfortunately conflict on one point:
XHTML 1.0 Strict doesn't allow an align attribute in an img tag, instead relying on CSS for positioning. MS Word, meanwhile, expects an align attribute and fails to recognize my CSS for image alignment.
I have been unable to find a way to solve the problem in CFMX 6.1 so far (If you do, please let me know). In ColdFusion MX 7, however, it would be pretty easy.
ColdFusion MX 7 comes with a new feature called Application Events which uses a new special file called "Application.cfc". If you use Application.cfc, then Application.cfm and onRequestEnd.cfm won't fire. Application.cfc allows you to capture errors, the start and (ta da!) end of a session, the start and end of an application, and the start and end of a request. It also allows you to supercede the request event (the page being called) as well.
OK. No time today to cover all of the things you can do with Application Events right now, so I will try to make this example as painfully simple as possible. Let's first replace (in the laziest way possible) our existing site structure with Application.cfc. Keep in mind, that this approach is for illustration only. I don't necessarily recommend you literally do what I am doing in practice.
Application.cfc:
<cfcomponent>
<cffunction name="onRequestStart"><cfinclude template="Application.cfm"></cffunction>
<cffunction name="onRequestEnd"><cfinclude template="OnRequestEnd.cfm"></cffunction>
</cfcomponent>
We have changed our code to use Application.cfc without changing the behavior of our site at all (keep in mind that you only need the onRequestEnd part if you site is using OnRequestEnd.cfm).
Now let's add an OnRequest event which will supercede the normal calling of the page. Note that any variables-scoped variables created in Application.cfc (or any file included by Application.cfc) will be available to the file being requested if-and-only-if it is included via the onRequest method.
<cfcomponent>Still no change in behavior. So far, so good. OK, now that we have changed the structure of our code, let's take advantage of that change. From now on, I am only going to look at the code in the "onRequest" event.
<cffunction name="onRequestStart"><cfinclude template="Application.cfm"></cffunction>
<cffunction name="onRequest">
<cfargument name="targetPage" type="string" required="true">
<cfinclude template="#arguments.targetPage#">
</cffunction>
<cffunction name="onRequestEnd"><cfinclude template="OnRequestEnd.cfm"></cffunction>
</cfcomponent>
<cfif isDefined("url.format") AND url.format eq "word">All we have to do now is change our class="right" and class="left" to align="right" and align="left" when the document is being served in MS Word.
<cfinclude template="#arguments.targetPage#">
<cfelse>
<cfinclude template="#arguments.targetPage#">
</cfif>
<cfif isDefined("url.format") AND url.format eq "word">That's it! Now, it should be noted that this code would replace all instances of class left or right with align in all tags (not just 'img') but won't get instances where more than one class is used on a single element. Perhaps a regular expression is needed, but that is a topic for another day. Nevertheless, the problem (at least in its simplest form) is solved.
<cfsavecontent variable="contents"><cfinclude template="#arguments.targetPag#"></cfsavecontent>
<cfset contents = ReplaceNoCase(contents, 'class="right"', 'align="right"', 'ALL')>
<cfset contents = ReplaceNoCase(contents, 'class="left"', 'align="left"', 'ALL')>
<cfoutput>#contents#</cfoutput>
<cfelse>
<cfinclude template="#arguments.targetPag#">
</cfif>
The newest version of ColdFusion (ColdFusion MX 7) has been released today. It is a pretty exciting new release. Unfortunately, Macromedia chose to restrict event gateways to the enterprise edition which dramatically reduces the incentive to upgrade.
Even so, it is worth taking a look at:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/
ColdFusion Developer's Journal will be covering the new release pretty extensively.
http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=48103
I will also try to discuss some of the new features in future entries. Application Events are pretty exciting and will likely be covered tomorrow.
On the CF-Talk list, Richard Colman asked how he could keep a session alive for longer than the 30 minute limit imposed by Crystal Tech.
Michael Dawson provided a very good answer (quoted below):
I setup my intranet so that, even if the session times-out, it will be transparent to the end-user. I do this by keeping a separate session cookie.
When the session times-out, then the user accesses another page in the application, my scripts will reload the data in the session scope again. The end-users have not complained about this process.
function keepAlive() {
var imgAlive = new Image();
var d = new Date();
imgAlive.src = '/alive.cfm?d=' + d;
}
setInterval("keepAlive()", 20*60*1000);
Alternatively, to get around the JavaScript bit, create an invisible IFRAME which has it SRC set to the alive.cfm.. On Alive.cfm, add a HTTP redirect to redirect back to itself after 1200 seconds.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="1200;URL=/alive.cfm?cachebuster=<cfoutput>#createUUID()#</cfoutput>">
