I was working with some RSS feeds recently and ran into a few challenges. The first was a "connection failure" error from one RSS feed - even though it loaded up correctly in the browser. Another one yielded the error "An error occured while Parsing an XML document. Content is not allowed in prolog." when I tried to parse the XML.
Fortunately, both of these problems turned out pretty easy to solve.
In our last Records/Manager blog entry, we dealt with XML syntax for defining a data structure in Manager.cfc. Although Manager.cfc is plenty useful by itself, I like to use it with Records.cfc.
Before we talk about how to get data into Records.cfc, we should cover how the two relate. Manager.cfc actually stores all of the data structure definitions and does all of the work. It manages the database (through DataMgr) and the files (through FileMgr) and image sizing (through CFIMAGE.cfc). So, why have Records.cfc at all?
I recently had a client request a favicon for their site. Normally this is no problem at all, but this time they added a bit of a twist that I didn't notice at first. As it caused me a small headache, I thought I would document here how I solved it for my own future reference.
The twist was that they wanted their customers to be able to drag the icon to their desktop to make a desktop link to their site. This is actually a feature of Internet Explorer, so it didn't provide any extra work there. The only problem is that a 16X16 favicon looks really bad when it is made into a 32X32 desktop icon.
In my last entry on Manager.cfc, we covered a fairly basic example of managing widgets with images and thumbnails. I want to step back this time and start with a more simple example to allow us to really dive in and understand some of what Manager.cfc provides. This example will be expanded in subsequent entries to provide more complexity to cover some of the challenges that you might run into in the real world.
For our example, we have a client that has asked us to build an HR application. One part of that is that the company has 5 departments:
When asked if these will ever change, our client says "I don't think so." (which, of course, means "probably"). So, let's set up the XML for this table:
This is a bit of a sad announcement, but I have to shut down my local (Tulsa, OK) CFUG today. Since my kids were born last January, the attention that I have given to the group has really suffered. In truth, I probably never put enough effort to it.
In any event, attendance hasn't been good for several months and I haven't made the time and effort to really change things enough. I think if I were going to really turn things around, I would have done so already.
Even so, the group has been around for seven years so I don't consider it a total failure. When I moved to Tulsa in 2002, it didn't have an active group and I resolved to make sure that I did. I hoped to find someone else to run it, but others were too busy. This was, as it turned out, quite a blessing.
A few months ago, I wrote about using Records.cfc and Manager.cfc to manage records and associated files. I just released a new build of the com.sebtools package that contains these components and it makes a really easy process even easier. I am really excited about how easy this stuff is now.
One of my favorite things about ColdFusion compared to other languages is the CFQUERY tag. It is just a real thing of beauty. I rarely use it any more, however, because I use DataMgr for my every day CRUD work (actually I use Manager.cfc, but that is another story). I rarely have to write any SQL code any more.
Rarely isn't the same as never, though. I have actually found a spectrum of cases for which I need to write custom SQL. First is the case where I need something more complicated than what DataMgr is built to handle and I don't need any of the functionality that DataMgr provides. In this case, I can easily move to using CFQUERY and I do so happily.
