Author: Wil (Page 2 of 5)

Module dependencies in interceptors

June 7, 2021 / Wil / 0 Comments

Interceptors in coldbox are very powerful. They are components which listen to events which are announced by the core framework or modules or custom events created by your application. But this post is not about all details of creating interceptors, you can read all about it in the coldbox documentation. I am using them all the time since they are so powerful, but sometimes they don’t behave as expected, especially when your interceptor depends on other modules.

Ahh yes, the good ol chicken and the egg problem
Luis Majano

So, what’s the problem with this chicken and her egg? Actually there are two related problems. One of them is easy to solve, the other takes some more effort.

Scheduled tasks in Coldbox

May 4, 2021 / Wil / 2 Comments

I often post about problematic stuff, like bugs, incomplete documentation or other annoyances. This post is different, and not even very detailed. We are talking about scheduling tasks. Luis Majano recently described the coldbox 6.4.0 release, which is mainly about scheduling. There is extensive documentation but scheduling is now so easy to code, I just wanted to share some examples with you. Coldbox 6.4 was only released a few weeks ago, but I think is is so extremely useful, we already implemented it in several projects. Ok, there was one bug which I will share with you, but that will be fixed soon, and is easy to avoid.

Closures vs lambda expressions

May 3, 2021 / Wil / 0 Comments

Yes, if you ever read my twitter profile, I am a bit old fashioned. I started writing CFML when it was still called DBML loooooong ago. Javascript was still simple, and javascript frameworks were eh… nonexisting? So don’t expect me to explain you everything about closures and lambda expressions. But they are not the same in CFML, that’s what I found out today. The hard way.

Using commandbox Lucee for production

April 27, 2021 / Wil / 1 Comment

We all know, commandbox is a wonderful tool for cfml development projects. It is very easy to spin up some version of Lucee or Adobe ColdFusion, configure a few settings and try out your code with this version. If you want to try other Lucee or ACF versions, you just spin up another version and try again. If you want to save yourself the hassle of configuring this new server again, you can export your settings from the previous version by using cfconfig and import it again.
Since commandbox can install lucee and ACF versions, the question arises if commandbox lucee (or ACF) is suitable for production. This question will come back now and then on the coldfusion and boxteam slack, and until recently I would say: no problem! As CTO and owner of a hosting company I decided this setup was capable for production for several of our customers. But I changed my mind, so let me explain.

PLUS PLUS PLUS… pinning to an exact lucee version in commandbox.

March 15, 2021 / Wil / 2 Comments

I am a bit frustrated. Usually we spin up our lucee servers in a commandbox environment, and since this is so easy most of the time we also use it in production. But upgrading these servers can be done in different ways.

Don’t use the admin

If you like to do this the oldfashioned way, you can open your lucee admin console, and use the update command. Please DON’T do this, it will get very messy soon. Let me show you. I start a lucee machine from the 5.3.5 range like this

Problem Details for HTTP APIs: Modifying your Coldbox REST handler response

February 2, 2021 / Wil / 2 Comments

Coldbox had a base handler and response for RESTful services for many years. Initially this was added in application templates but in version 6 this functionality was added to the core. The base handler wraps around your own actions and provides a lot of automatic errorhandling, addition of some development headers and some global headers. By using the default event.getResponse() response (available as prc.response in previous versions) it provides a default response format which looks like this:

{
    "data": {
        "name": "someData"
        "id": "98765",
        "name": "provMan"
    },
    "error": false,
    "pagination": {
         "totalPages": 1,
         "maxRows": 0,
         "offset": 0,
         "page": 1,
         "totalRecords": 0
    },
    "messages": []
}

That’s a lot of different keys for a default response format. The data field makes sense most of the time, and the pagination key (which is new in cb6) can be handy but we don’t use it (yet). The error and messages keys are less useful to us. Let me explain why first, and then I will explain how to modify your responses in coldbox 6.

cbi18n-json-resources: localization with JSON resources

January 11, 2021 / Wil / 0 Comments

This week I created my first official forgebox package: cbi18n-json-resources , a cbi18n JSON ResourceService. This module tries to improve the cbi18n Ortus module by offering

json resource files instead of java resources
locales organized by directory instead of partial filenames
optional default resource file(s)
hierarchical resources, so both en_GB and en_US can be handled by the same resource file, except for the different country-specific translations
and an interceptor for missing translations

So why this module instead of improving the cbi18n module itself?

Customize your resource routing in Coldbox

December 22, 2020 / Wil / 0 Comments

In this post I will show you how coldbox can help you creating resourceful routes, how cbswagger shows me that I don’t want the defaults resource() routing method, and how easy it is to create your own method!

If you want to create a REST API in coldbox, you often need to create a lot of routes for this API. So let’s say you want to create endpoints to list, view, update, create and delete a User resource. Following the coldbox manual, I need to implement the following routes:

Configuring SES URL’s on apache and the Coldbox router.

December 15, 2020 / Wil / 0 Comments

Often when we deploy a coldbox website we fire up commandbox, create a webserver and put NGINX in front to route our application requests to the correct lucee instance. We never experienced any problems when configuring search engine safe (SES) url’s. Just to remind you: instead of writing this

https://mysite.nl/index.cfm?event=myhandler.myaction

we can rewrite this to something more friendly such as

https://mysite4u.nl/myhandler/myaction

So we proxy our request via Nginx to a lucee coldbox application and use some rewrite rules as described in the coldbox manual. Recently we had a slightly different configuration: apache in front of an old-fashioned standard lucee standard install on Linux. Again, we followed instructions in the same coldbox manual but NO success…

Event.buildLink: query params vs path variables

December 8, 2020 / Wil / 0 Comments

I had some issues with how event.buildlink() in Coldbox is generating a URL. To understand what’s my problem let me introduce the old-fashioned way to hit a coldbox application

http://mysite.ext/index.cfm?event=user&age=30
or
http://mysite.ext/index.cfm?event=user.index&age=30

With some rewrite magic this last form can be written as

http://mysite.ext/user/index&age=30
or even
http://mysite.ext/user/index/age/30

So all four forms are behaving the same, if you apply the correct rewrite rules in your webserver and the default rules in the Coldbox router. The coldbox manual has some info on rewrites for several webservers. So in most cases the web is rewriting your url’s in such a format that coldbox will receive this:

http://mysite.ext/index.cfm?user/index/age/30

Coldbox itself is smart enough to hand this over to the router, which has some default rules enabled which translate the user/index/age/30 to:

event = user.index
age=30