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.
Tag: lucee
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
Continue readingAdobe introduced full null support in ColdFusion 2018. Before 2018 null values returned by databases and external systems were converted to empty strings. This behaviour made it almost impossible to distinguish between empty strings and null values, and also caused issues with serialization and deserialization. You also had to take special precautions to insert or update null values in a database. Interaction with Java, including CFORM based hibernate could also result in returned null values so we always had te be very careful when trying to handle these dreaded nulls.
Lucee already has full null support since many years, but just as with the latest ACF version, you have to enable this in the administrator, just to stay compatible with older versions of ACF.
So, because of all these null handling issues, why not enable full null support? That’s what we imagined when creating our latest REST based application. But before hurrying to your admin panel better think if it will break something.
Before the Modernize or die times as promoted by Ortus Solutions there were many ways to find out in Coldbox if all input variables existed. Let me give these two JSON examples, both are used for the creation of a user in the body of a post request:
//first example, customer_id as a null value because customer is not selected yet
{
"customer_id": null,
"username": "wdb",
"password": "topsecret"
}
//second example, customer_id omitted because customer is not selected yet
{
"username": "wdb",
"password": "topsecret"
}
When we post this userdata, I want to validate if my customer_id is there so I can populate some required customer field. When null support is not enabled we have a few options to check if we have a usable customer_id.
function createUser( event, rc, prc ) {
//option 1
if ( event.valueExists("customer_id") ){
//....
}
//option 2
if ( structKeyExists(rc,"customer_id") ){
//....
}
//option 3
if ( !isNull(rc.customer_id) ){
//....
}
The first options seems to make sense. Event.valueExists
is a way to check if my customer_id
is a value in my request collection.
The second options is slightly more low level, it just checks the request collection for the existence of customer_id
.
The third option is a little bit more direct. It just checks if rc.customer_id
is not null so I can continue.
So it seems it doesn’t matter which method I use. But now I enable full null support, and the whole landscape is changing. In the previous part I just assumed the key should be there, or not be null.
But now I have to know what my frontEnd VueJS developer is doing. Is he sending a null value for customer_id if there is no customer selection yet? Or is he only sending values in the JSON body which already have a value? This will make a lot of difference .
If my frondend developer is sending null values and I enable null support in CFML my event.valueExists
and StructKeyExists()
checks are completely useless, because my customer_id variable now does exist in the request collection. The problem here is it’s value is useless, because I can’t retrieve a required customer based on a null value. So the only safe check now is the !Isnull(rc.customer_id)
.
The situation is still a bit different if you also want to be able to update a database based on the input of a null value. In that case you have to check for both Event.ValueExists
AND IsNull
.
The above examples seem quite trivial, but a word of warning is appropriate here. You really have to know how your frontend application should handle these null values. Are you validating ALL properties, or only the properties which have been entered by the user?
A second important point is the handling of nulls in some of your supporting libraries. We failed a lot of tests because one of our libraries tried to determine the datatype of our input automatically. Since null values have no datatype the library failed. This was fixed very soon, but especially when using some older libraries or modules you really should take a close look at the code when possible.
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