Introduction to Macromedia Coldfusion MX 7, Part III Gateways, Charting, Searching, and other new goodness Presented by the Mid-Michigan Coldfusion User’s Group 5/9/2005

The Final Part of the Series… In previous meetings, we discussed: –The New CF Forms (Flash Forms) –The New CF Document Commands (PDF) –The New CF Reporting Application This week’s meeting: –Gateways –Charting Enhancements –Verity Searching Enhancements –Other various enhancements in CF7

Gateways Gateways are Macromedia’s solution to integrate CFML with other applications and protocols. It also allows one to create processes that are executed asynchronously. Available in the Enterprise Edition, and Developer editions ONLY.

Gateways Possible uses of Gateways: –Asynchronous Logger Still get the verbose logs, but don’t sacrifice your processor power during heavy loads. –Interact directly with Cell Phones via SMS Includes a SMS tester, and instructions on how to make your CFML apps “SMS-Aware” –Interact directly with the TCP/IP stack Make an SNMP trap, a full featured FTP server, or even your own web-server!

Gateways Caveats –Requires Enterprise Edition Your target audience may be limited. –To create custom gateways, it requires an extensive Java background Limiting to non-java programmers outside the “standard components” –The SMS gateway requires an SMS aggregator to use outside of testing… $$$

Included Gateways Asynchronous CFML Gateway –Allows you to spawn asynchronous CFML pages to do background processing, for example Directory Watcher –Watch for files to change, and trigger events if the directory changes JMS Gateway –Seamless communication between your application and most Java Aware applications

Included Gateways SAMETIME Gateway –IBM Lotus Notes Instant Messenger Gateway SMS Gateway –Communicate directly with Cell Phone Text Messaging Socket Gateway –Work directly with the TCP/IP stack to send/receive data (Telnet) XMPP Gateway –Instant Message with Jabber clients

Using Gateways Using the Event Gateways feature of Coldfusion is easy! –All events are triggered using specially named CFC Functions! –Those events are automatically called by the running gateway, no work needed to get them to execute. –These events can also be triggered by CFML code.

Gateways Example Experience Bank Example

Charting Enhancements… Coldfusion MX 7 now has a completely new charting engine, which is extremely customizable! –Labeling / Dates works! –Custom Charts Can be derived as XML files, or can be put on server and called by name Charting Designer included in CFMX7 Install

Charting Enhancements… Make sure Java is installed… Double click on the “webcharts.bat” within the charting directory in the Coldfusion Root Directory

Charting Enhancements…

Once you have customized the chart the way you like, click on the “XML Style” tab, and click on the “Save” button Save your style in the Charting\Styles directory in your Coldfusion Root. You can now call the new style via the style=“” attribute of the tag.

Charting Example CFchart.cfm

Verity and Searching For the MX 7 release of Coldfusion, Macromedia got us a new version of Verity K2 Search Engine This new release allows us to –Full Text Searching (same as previous versions) –Spelling Corrections based on indexes (new) –Highlighted Search Results (new) –Search within results (new)

Verity and Searching Highlighting Search Context –By setting the “contextPassages” attribute of the command to a non-zero number (zero is the default), you can pull the highlighted context from the resulting Query –Use the “context” column from the query to display the results, instead of the “summary” –This works with ALL documents, except for PDF files.

Verity and Searching “Did you mean …. ?” –By setting the “status” attribute of the, you can enable suggested spelling results. –Spelling Results are derived by the index of the collection, *NOT* a dictionary, so names of products, or models will return results –Creating the “status” structure, is a small performance hit, so watch out!

Verity and Searching Did you mean #info.SuggestedQuery#?? #context#

Verity and Searching Searching within results –Now you can do efficient searches of search results. Verity will cache your searches and allow you to search the results for additional results. Using the previousCriteria attribute, you can pass the name of the Search Query of the search you wish to mine.

Verity and Searching Categories! –You can now categorize your new collections for searching, and search only certain categories. –For example, if you wanted to create a search tool for a software company, you might create categories such as whitepapers, documentation, release notes, and marketing collateral.

Verity and Searching Categories! –Create your new collection with the Categories attribute set to “yes” –Use the Category / CategoryTree attribute when creating the index with the CFINDEX tag. –Use the Category / CategoryTree attribute when using the CFSEARCH tag. This will delimit the return results to those categories.

Verity and Searching <cfcollection action = "action" collection = "collectionName" path = "path_to_verity_collection" language = "English" categories = "yes"> <cfindex collection="#Form.IndexColl#" action="update" extensions=".htm,.html,.xls,.txt,.mif,.doc,.pdf" key="#Form.IndexDir#" type="path" urlpath="#Form.urlPrefix#" recurse="Yes" language="English" category="taste, touch, sight, sound, smell" categoryTree="human/senses/taste">

Verity and Searching <cfsearch collection="collectionName" name="results" maxrows = "100" criteria="search keywords" category="FAQ,Technote" categoryTree="Docs/Tags">

The *NEW* Application.CFC In CFMX7, Macromedia introduced the Application.CFC –Now includes an elegant way to run code on application start, application end, session begin, session end, page begin, and page end. –Application.CFC supersedes the Application.CFM and OnRequestEnd.CFM

Method NameMethod Runs When onApplicationEnd()The application ends: the application times out, or the server is stopped onApplicationStart()The application first starts: the first request for a page is processed or the first CFC method is invoked by an event gateway instance, or a web services or Macromedia Flash Remoting CFC. onError()An exception occurs that is not caught by a try/catch block. onRequest()The onRequestStart method finishes. (This method can filter request contents.) onRequestEnd()All pages in the request have been processed: onRequestStart()A request starts onSessionEnd()A session ends onSessionStart()A session starts

The *NEW* Application.CFC The Methods will be executed in the following order: –onApplicationStart (if not run before for this application) –onSessionStart (if not run before for this session) –onRequestStart –onRequest –onRequestEnd

The *NEW* Application.CFC There is no tag available when you use the Application.cfc –You must set all the application settings via the this.xxx variable in the constructor. The tag is discouraged from being used. Use the OnError method instead.

Other new enhancements… Dreamweaver Enhancements –Improves components usability. –Auto-create CFC’s to interact with queries Better CFCs –No longer suffers from certain design issues from prior releases CF Administrator API –A true API to work with data sources, etc.

Other new enhancements… New DB Drivers –Improved performance Note: No longer supports mySQL 4.x out of the box due to licensing restrictions. You can download the new JDBC driver from Bug fixes, and other little add-ons –Don’t worry, we won’t list them all here

Q&A