I ran into a situation recently which required me to parse a string into a Date object in Flex. After some searching I found that there’s a wonderful little method in the DateFormatter class called parseDateString. Unfortunately, that method is protected and I couldn’t gain access to it. Luckily, I came accross a blog post that provided a wonderful solution: http://flex2colombia.wordpress.com/2007/02/18/dateformatter-parsedatestring-replacement/

The basis is that the Date class has a static method for parsing dates (parse()) which accepts a single String as a parameter. Here is an example:

var dateString:String = "Tue Jul 29 13:40:56 GMT-0500 2008";
var d:Date = new Date(Date.parse(dateString));

Just like that, you have a Date object to work with in Flex.

The following string formats are acceptable (all of which are recognized by Flex as a Date)

• MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS TZD
• HH:MM:SS TZD Day Mon/DD/YYYY
• Mon DD YYYY HH:MM:SS TZD
• Day Mon DD HH:MM:SS TZD YYYY
• Day DD Mon HH:MM:SS TZD YYYY
• Mon/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS TZD
• YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS TZD

I gave a presentation about Cascading Style Sheets and why they are important last night at the local Nebraska ColdFusion Users Group last night. Thanks to those who attended and brought questions.

For anyone interested, the presentation materials, including examples are available online at http://jake.cfwebtools.com/css_pres/css.zip.

As always, questions are welcome via my blog, via email or in person

How I’ve gone as far as I have without looking into this sooner is beyond me. Creating Custom Types is basically how I spend 80% of my time and I had hit a wall until now. Custom Types deserve custom config options so their behavior can be configured by the users. Here’s how…

I have a very simply type which is a way to track registrations. The fields are unimportant, it’s simply a way to track what’s entered on registration forms. The client came back and wanted to be able to send the completed forms to someone via email but that person might change. So, rather than me having to change the code manually any time the email had to change, I set up a custom config for this type.

1. Create a .cfm file in /farcry/ /system/dmConfig/ with the name you want to show up (i.e. myCustomConfig.cfm will show up as myCustomConfig in the config files list)
2. Inside the file create a structure containing the config options with defaults:

3. <cfscript>
   	stConfig = StructNew();
   	stConfig.EmailFrom = "info@bryanlgh.org";
   	stConfig.EmailTo = "55PLUS@bryanlgh.org";
   	stConfig.EmailSubject = "55PLUS Application";
   </cfscript>

4. Log into farcry and navigate to Admin -> Custom Config
5. Deploy your config
6. navigate to Admin -> Config Files
7. Update as necessary

Doing this will essentially create a new key in the structure “application.config” with the same name as the filename you created and placed in dmConfig. Farcry automatically handles updating the custom config files.

There is additional information at the Farcry Wiki

I’ve been helping out with a flex project at work and have been learning some really cool things about it. Coming from a java background a lot of this is familiar but Flex has some really neat features built in.

One that I found recently is the Sort class in the collections package. Pretty much all UI components (Lists, Datagrids, etc) take some kind of collection as their data provider. The question came up, “How do you sort a datagrid manually?” We all know you can click the labels and the grid will sort itself but how do you do that in code. Here’s how:

// Create a new Sort Object
mySort = new Sort();

// Create a SortField Object
// The paramater is the field in the Array Collection to sort on
sortByLabel = new SortField("labelField");

// add Fields to your Sort Object.
// This is standard array notation so multiple sorts would be [sort1,sort2,sort3]
mySort.fields=[sortByLabel];

// set the sort object as the Array Collections sort
myArrayCollection.sort=mySort;

// refresh the Array Collection
myArrayCollection.refresh();

Now, assuming you have bound your data provider in your datagrid (i.e. dataProvider=”{myArrayCollection}”) the datagrid will sort as soon as the Array Collection is refreshed.

A big thanks to Bruce Phillips’ post for pointing me in the right direction.

CF Webtools works on plenty of e-commerce sites. Some generate only a trivial amount of revenue and others generate millions every year. The most common implementations we see and deal with are authorize.net and paypal. Both have very standard APIs and a feature list that is continuously expanding. Recently I was given a project which required implementing Virtual Merchant into Site Director and Farcry. It also required the ability to use multiple merchants through the same implementation in Farcry. Here’s what I did…

continue reading "ColdFusion Implementation of Virtual Merchant"

I’ve struggled with popups for some time now. I’ve never really found a good way to handle popping up a new window when clicking a link. Sure, there is the target=”_blank” method but I’ve heard that in XHTML1.0 that is not actually valid. That tells me that browsers can still handle this but might not sometime in the future (or it might end up being included in some kind of quirks rendering mode in the future). A standard Javascript popup is another option but is too easily disabled.

This method will actually do both by creating an event handler.

continue reading "Javascript Popup with graceful fallback"

I’ve had some requests that I blog a dmFlash technique that I use in both version 3 and verion 4 of Farcry. This sounds much more glamourous than it actually is. I really just use a container with a handpicked rule but here are the details you will need to use this for yourself:

continue reading "dmFlash Technique"

Something about Farcry has bothered me for a while. It is difficult to link to content programatically, especially if you have a navigation node with multiple content items under it. For example, I have an application that I was writing which contained a calendar and a registration piece. Each was a separate dmInclude under the same dmNavigation node. So, how do I create a “Register Now” button from the calendar to the registration piece programmatically? Sure, I could hard-code the objectID but that just wasn’t cutting it for this. Sure, it would work, but would be easily broken. If the registration piece was ever deleted and re-created, there would be a new UUID for it and the user would not be able to recover the functionality without editing code or the database record. So, I came up with a better solution…

continue reading "Custom contentObjectGet Widget"

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the greatest when it comes to database design, optimization, even query code when it comes right down to it. Sure, I can do the standard CRUD things withough a problem but really digging into a database is not my cup of tea. So, when I came up with something actually usable, I had to post it So, on with the shameless self-promotion…

So, I am using an IF EXISTS … ELSE block for an INSERT/UPDATE query and was having an issue with the message handler. Yeah, I could have added some additional ColdFusion logic, but who wants to do that??? I thought, It’d be really great if the query would give me back the results of what action was actually taken. So, Here’s the original query:

<cfquery name="addUpdate" datasource="#application.CaseInfoDsn#">
	IF EXISTS (		SELECT 	AreaCode
					FROM 	area_codes
					WHERE 	AreaCode = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#form.originalAreaCode#">
			  		OR		AreaCode = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#form.AreaCode#">	)
		BEGIN
			UPDATE 	area_codes
			SET		AreaCode = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#trim(form.AreaCode)#">,
					State_Region = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#trim(form.State_Region)#">,
					Description = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#trim(form.Description)#">
			WHERE 	AreaCode = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#form.originalAreaCode#">
			OR		AreaCode = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#form.AreaCode#">

		END
	ELSE
		BEGIN
			INSERT
			INTO 	area_codes
					(
						AreaCode,
						State_Region,
						Description
					)
			VALUES
					(
						<cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#trim(form.AreaCode)#">,
						<cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#trim(form.State_Region)#">,
						<cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#trim(form.Description)#">
					)

		END
</cfquery>

And Here’s my addition:

<cfquery name="addUpdate" datasource="#application.CaseInfoDsn#">
	IF EXISTS (		SELECT 	AreaCode
					FROM 	area_codes
					WHERE 	AreaCode = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#form.originalAreaCode#">
			  		OR		AreaCode = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#form.AreaCode#">	)
		BEGIN
			UPDATE 	area_codes
			SET		AreaCode = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#trim(form.AreaCode)#">,
					State_Region = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#trim(form.State_Region)#">,
					Description = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#trim(form.Description)#">
			WHERE 	AreaCode = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#form.originalAreaCode#">
			OR		AreaCode = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#form.AreaCode#">

			SELECT	TOP 1 'upd' AS actionTaken
			FROM	area_codes
		END
	ELSE
		BEGIN
			INSERT
			INTO 	area_codes
					(
						AreaCode,
						State_Region,
						Description
					)
			VALUES
					(
						<cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#trim(form.AreaCode)#">,
						<cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#trim(form.State_Region)#">,
						<cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#trim(form.Description)#">
					)

			SELECT	TOP 1 'ins' AS actionTaken
			FROM	area_codes
		END
</cfquery>

After each action (Insert or Update) I select a random string with a random alias which I can then use for my message handler. Hopefully someone else out there thinks this is cool because I sure do

I don’t know why but the voices inside my head that are supposed to tell me when to stop have stopped talking. Now there’s nothing to stop me from going overboard.

To illustrate this point, I give you exhibit A. Exhibit A is a photograph from a recent fast food outing at Fuddruckers (that’s a burger joint if you don’t know). They offer the normal burgers but also have buffalo burgers and ostrich burgers. They also have burgers going up to a massive one pound!

Yes, your initial thought is correct. I had a one pound burger. Not only that but I had an order of fries and a huge soda along with it.

Just to give you an illustration of how big this burger was… The bun was not a normal bun, it was a small loaf of bread. It took 4 slices of cheese to cover it and 2 large pieces of lettuce.

Big Burger