Introducing Filters
I was working a project recently that required me to filter records by a date range. This represented a rare case where my use of DataMgr seemed to make my life more difficult rather than easier.
CF_BlogPicks January 28, 2008
This week saw a major discussion on the future of IE8 and compatibility and the launch of Inside RIA.
Scheduled Task Start Time
I have been using ColdFusion since the 20th century and I thought I understood how it worked pretty well by now. I am not sure how this one slipped by me.
CF_BlogPicks January 21, 2008
This week saw one major news announce and two entries each from two of the community's more prolific bloggers.
DataMgr 2.2 Alpha (with Derby support!)
It has been 6 months since DataMgr 2.1 was released. In that time I have been slowly improving my local copy of DataMgr. I now think that the improvements are ready for public trial. I am running several live sites on the build that I am making public.
CF_BlogPicks January 14, 2008
I found several discussions on the same topic this week. So, this time I am grouping some blog entries by topic. The top link is what I would consider the main primary entry on the topic, followed by a few picks on that topic.
Inserting Custom SQL into DataMgr
We ran into a situation on a current project where we needed to return a column based on complicated logic. We needed to have a column that indicated if the value of an answer had changed since the user had originally answered the question. This logic was sufficiently complicated that even a custom relation field wouldn't do the job.
In situations where a layer of abstraction isn't able to handle the complexity required, it makes sense to break out of that layer of abstraction. That is why a ColdFusion programmer may sometimes (rarely) have to revert to Java. For DataMgr, this suggests writing SQL manually in situations like this.
In our case, however, we had already defined several relation fields that we needed to use and we didn't want to have to redefine them (or to ask DataMgr for the SQL for each relation field individually). We needed a way to add a field composed of complex SQL to our query without losing the benefit of our DataMgr relation fields.
ColdFusion Blogs Picks of the Week
This is my first post in what I hope will be a ongoing series. In my discussion with other developers, I have often found that they miss blog posts that I think every ColdFusion programmer should see. The reason seems pretty clear: With so much blog traffic, it takes too much time to read through all of the traffic.
Learning from Voldemort
My wife and I are both big fans of the Harry Potter series. It seemed, after finishing the series, that Lord Voldemort had no redeeming qualities. Recent events, however, have convinced me that Voldemort has a valuable lesson to teach.
