ColdFusion Tips & Tricks

Converting Application.cfm to Application.cfc

Using an Application.cfc configuration file offers some advantages over the older style Application.cfm configuration files. Some of the main features that an Application.cfc file give you are "functions triggered by Application, Session, Request, and Error events" and "Application-Level Mappings and Custom Tag Paths".

There are only a few steps required to convert an application to use an Application.cfc file:

NOTE: You should ensure that you have a backup of any files before making changes to them.

Create an Application.cfc file

Below is an example Application.cfc file with the minimum requirements:

<cfcomponent>
	<cfscript>
		this.name = hash( getCurrentTemplatePath() ); // unique app name
	</cfscript>
</cfcomponent>

Setup onRequest function in Application.cfc to include the Application.cfm file

This step is only necessary if an Application.cfm file already exists in the root of the application. Below is what the Application.cfc file will look like after this addition:

<cfcomponent>
	<cfscript>
		this.name = hash( getCurrentTemplatePath() ); // unique app name
	</cfscript>

	<cffunction name="onRequest" returnType="void">
		<cfargument name="targetPage" type="string" required="true" />

		<!--- Include Application.cfm --->
		<cfinclude template="Application.cfm" />

		<!--- Include the requested page --->
		<cfinclude template="#ARGUMENTS.targetPage#" />
	</cffunction>
</cfcomponent>

Copy application settings from the cfapplication tag and remove the cfapplication tag

This step is only necessary if a cfapplication tag is used within the application. Each attribute of the cfapplication tag will need to be copied into the cfscript section at the top of the Application.cfc with the pattern [this.attributeName = "value";].

For example. The below cfapplication tag would be converted into our Application.cfc example as follows:

cfapplication tag:

<cfapplication
	name = "my_app_name"
	sessionManagement = "Yes"
	sessionTimeout = "#createTimeSpan(0,0,20,0)#"
	setClientCookies = "Yes">

Application.cfc:

<cfcomponent>
	<cfscript>
		this.name = "my_app_name"; // app name from old cfapplication tag
		this.sessionManagement = "Yes";
		this.sessionTimeout = CreateTimeSpan(0,0,20,0);
		this.setClientCookies = "Yes";
	</cfscript>

	<cffunction name="onRequest" returnType="void">
		<cfargument name="targetPage" type="string" required="true" />

		<!--- Include Application.cfm --->
		<cfinclude template="Application.cfm" />

		<!--- Include the requested page --->
		<cfinclude template="#ARGUMENTS.targetPage#" />
	</cffunction>
</cfcomponent>

NOTE: Do not forget to remove the cfapplication tag after copying the settings into the Application.cfc file.

Now that the change is complete, this is a good time to test the application to ensure everything is working correctly with the new setup.

CFHTTP Connection Failures over HTTPS

Shared Hosting

If you try to use <cfhttp> to connect to a secure site (over HTTPS), you may receive the following error: "Connection Failure: Status code unavailable"

To fix this add the following code to your site's "Application.cfm" file (below the 'cfapplication' tag):

<!--- fix for HTTPS connection failures --->
<cfif NOT isDefined("Application.sslfix")>
	<cfset objSecurity = createObject("java", "java.security.Security") />
	<cfset objSecurity.removeProvider("JsafeJCE") />
	<cfset Application.sslfix = true />
</cfif>

If your site uses an "Application.cfc" file instead, then just place that code in the "'onApplicationStart()" method of that file. After making that adjustment you'll need to restart your ColdFusion application as shown here.

VPS Hosting

If you are having issues connecting to a site or file from with ColdFusion over HTTPS, you can import the remote site's SSL certificate into the the Java SSL Certificate Store used by ColdFusion.

1)Set Java environment

   C:\ColdFusion10\jre>set JAVA_HOME=c:\coldfusion10\jre
   C:\ColdFusion10\jre>set PATH=%PATH%;%JAVA_HOME%\bin

2)List what in in keystore

   keytool -list -storepass changeit -keystore ../lib/security/cacerts
   Keystore type: JKS
   Keystore provider: SUN
   Your keystore contains 76 entries

3)Import certificate in to keystore and list to check added.

   keytool -importcert -storepass changeit -alias inet -keystore ../lib/security/cacerts -trustcacerts -file c:\temp\inet.cer
   Trust this certificate? [no]: y
   Certificate was added to keystore

   keytool -list -storepass changeit -keystore ../lib/security/cacerts
   Keystore type: JKS
   Keystore provider: SUN
   Your keystore contains 77 entries

4)Restart CF10 app service so keystore is re-read.

5)Run your cfhttp request - HTTPS works now!

CFMAIL Multi-Part Emails

Sending emails with both Text and HTML parts helps reduce the chance of your messages getting caught by a mail server's spam filter. It also helps ensure your recipients can read the message regardless of the mail client being used. The easiest way to do this is to store your message in a variable using <cfsavecontent> then adding it to <cfmail> using <cfmailpart> as shown in the example below:

<!--- Store your message in a variable --->
<cfsavecontent variable="myemailcontent">
Hello,

This is some plain text. <br />
<b>And this is some more text in HTML. It will appear in plain-text for anyone who views the Text part of this email, though.</b>
</cfsavecontent>

<!--- Function to strip HTML from message while preserving line breaks --->
<cffunction name= "textMessage" access= "public" returntype= "string" hint= "Converts an html email message into a nicely formatted with line breaks plain text message">
    <cfargument name= "string" required= "true" type= "string">
    <cfscript>
      var pattern = " <br>";
      var CRLF = chr( 13) & chr( 10);
      var message = ReplaceNoCase(arguments.string, pattern, CRLF , "ALL");
      pattern = "<[^>]*>";
    </cfscript>
    <cfreturn REReplaceNoCase(message, pattern, "" , "ALL")>
</cffunction>
 
<!--- Now send the email. When adding the Text part, we'll use the textMessage() function we just created to strip out HTML tags. --->
<cfmail from="sender@domain.com" to="recipient@anotherdomain.com" subject="Multi-part Email with CFMAIL" type="html">
    <cfmailpart type= "text/plain" charset= "utf-8">#textmessage(myemailcontent)#</cfmailpart>
    <cfmailpart type= "text/html" charset= "utf-8">#myemailcontent#</cfmailpart>
</cfmail>

Reference: CFMAIL the right way

Per-Application ColdFusion Mappings

In ColdFusion 8 and above, it is possible to create per-application mappings through your site's Application.cfc file.

Once you have your Application.cfc created, you will insert the following line:

<cfset this.mappings["/test"]="d:\home\yourdomainname.com\wwwroot\test">

On your site though, you would change "/test" to the name of your mapping. IMPORTANT: You need to include the forward slash before the name of your mapping. Also, change "d:\home\yourdomainname.com\wwwroot\test" to the full physical path to the folder you wish to map. Note: The physical path to your FTP root is listed in the "Site Settings" of your control panel at wcp.hostek.com.

To call a template named "testing.cfm" in the "test" directory we just mapped, you would use this line:

<cfinclude template="/test/testing.cfm">

Per-Application Custom Tag Paths

Starting in ColdFusion 8, ColdFusion allows creation of Custom Tag Paths in each site's Application.cfc file. This allows you to create and manage your Custom Tag Paths without having to use CF Administrator (ie. submit a support ticket). The following steps will help you create a Custom Tag Path:

If you do not already have an Application.cfc file in your site's Web root, create one now. Place the following code in the Application.cfc file and save:

<cfcomponent>
<cfset THIS.customtagpaths="d:\home\yourdomain.com\wwwroot\customtagfolder">
</cfcomponent>

In this case, you'd replace "yourdomain.com" with your domain name, and "customtagfolder" with the name of the folder you created for your custom tags.

Now you have successfully added your custom tag path. If you have multiple tag paths to add, try using the following code instead:

<cfcomponent>
<cfset THIS.customtagpaths=ListAppend(THIS.customtagpaths, "d:\home\yourdomain.com\wwwroot\customtagfolder")>
</cfcomponent>

Restart a ColdFusion Application

If you ever need to restart your site's ColdFusion application (to pick up a setting change, etc), you can do so via the ApplicationStop() function in ColdFusion 9+.

To use this you can create a file (ex: restart.cfm) containing the following code:

<cfset ApplicationStop() />
<cflocation url="index.cfm" addtoken="false" />

When you run the file containing that code your ColdFusion Application will be stopped (flushing your application scope), and when the browser is redirected to the index page the application will start again.

Scheduling Tasks in ColdFusion

On occasion shared ColdFusion hosting customers need to setup Scheduled Task to run files on a cycle.

This can be done with the following steps, making use of ColdFusion's <cfschedule> tag:

1. Create a file locally using any text editor, save the file with the .CFM extension (example: setschedule_example.cfm).
2. Copy and past in the code example below taken from ColdFusion's Documentation and save.
3. Replace the data in the example note the following recommendations.
   !- Name each file made for creating a schedule with the name of the task so you can reference the task later if needed. Specific naming will also make it more difficult for someone to randomly run the file.
   !- If you need to schedule a job to run monthly on any date in the range 28-31, read about how ColdFusion will handle the scheduling in the ColdFuison8 documentation referenced below.
4. Working example, the code example below is a working tested solution for getting the weather for a specific zip code and the task to email the results.

Scheduled Task

<!-- This sets the initial task, if your just wanting to set the schedule -->
<cfschedule action = "update"
    task = "Weather_Send" 
    operation = "HTTPRequest"
    url = "http://test.hostek.net/weather_send.cfm"
    startDate = "7/6/09"
    startTime = "09:30 AM"
    interval = "3600"
    resolveURL = "Yes"
    requestTimeOut = "600">

<!-- This allows for the task created to be deleted, just uncomment and change the task name. -->
<!-- cfschedule action = "delete"
    task = "Weather_Send"-->

<!-- This allows for the task to be paused, just uncomment and change the task name. -->
<!-- cfschedule action = "pause"
    task = "Weather_Send"-->

<!-- This allows for the task resumed if paused, just uncomment and change the task name. -->
<!-- cfschedule action = "resume"
    task = "Weather_Send"-->

Weather Collector

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>CF External Weather Checker</title>
</head>
 
<body>

<cfset zip="12345">
 
<cfinvoke webservice="http://ws.cdyne.com/WeatherWS/Weather.asmx?wsdl" method="getCityWeatherByZIP" returnvariable="aWeatherReturn">
     <cfinvokeargument name="ZIP" value="#zip#"/>
</cfinvoke>

<cfif aWeatherReturn.temperature EQ "">
<cfoutput> I cannot get the weather for #zip# external http connections must be DOWN.</cfoutput>
<cfelse>
<cfset message="The temperature for #zip# (Your city) is #aWeatherReturn.temperature# degrees.">
</cfif>

<cfif message NEQ "">

<cfmail from = "weather.server@test.com" to = "test@test.com" subject = "Weather checker">

#message#

</cfmail>

</cfif>
 
</body>
</html>

Session Management - Handling Bots and Spiders

Robots.txt File

First and foremost we suggest creating a robots.txt file in the web root of the domain to address two issues. First to control the rate at which the website is being crawled which can help prevent a bot/spider from creating a massive number of database connections at the same time. Second to prevent specific bots from crawling the website. We suggest the following defaults, however you might want to add or remove the user agents denied, and adjust the crawl rate but we suggest nothing lower than 3 seconds.

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /

User-agent: Sosospider
Disallow: /

Lower Session Timeouts for Bots and Spiders

Next we suggest setting your session timeout specifically lower for bots and spiders. These spiders and bots will crawl a page and when a session (ColdFusion) is created, it will persist during then entire page load. The page fully loaded allows the bot or spider to get the information from the Web page AND allows the session to expire quickly protecting ColdFusion from effects similar to a memory leak.

To do this, implement the appropriate solution for your site below:

If using Application.cfm

Place this code at the top of your Application.cfm file:

<!--- This checks if a cookie is created, for bots this will return false and use the low session timeout --->
<cfif not structKeyExists(cookie, "cfid")>
 <cfset REQUEST.sessionTimeout = CreateTimeSpan(0,0,0,2) />
<cfelse>
 <cfset REQUEST.sessionTimeout = CreateTimeSpan(0,0,30,0) />
</cfif>

Then use the REQUEST.sessionTimeout variable to specify the session timeout period in your cfapplication tag:

</cfif>
<cfapplication name="myawesomeapp"
     sessionmanagement="Yes"
     sessiontimeout="#REQUEST.sessionTimeout#">

If using Application.cfc (tag-based)

If you primarily use cfml tags in your Application.cfc, you can set the Session Timeout like this:

<!--- This checks if a cookie is created, for bots this will return false and use the low session timeout --->
<cfif StructKeyExists(cookie, "cfid")>
 <cfset this.sessiontimeout = CreateTimeSpan(0,0,30,0) />
 <cfelse>
 <cfset this.sessiontimeout = CreateTimeSpan(0,0,0,2) />
</cfif>

If using Application.cfc (cfscript)

If instead, you're using cfscipt in your Application.cfc, you'll set the custom Session Timeout like this:

<!--- This checks if a cookie is created, for bots this will return false and use the low session timeout --->
if (StructKeyExists(cookie, "cfid")){
this.sessionTimeout 	= createTimeSpan(0,0,30,0);
} else {
this.sessionTimeout 	= createTimeSpan(0,0,0,2);
}

Reference: Session Management code examples for the Application.cfm

Output CF Error details without CFDump

It is common in an error handler that you want to output all of the error details to the screen, a file, or an email. Therefore, the cfdump tag is commonly used for this; and, while this works well in development, it is not always the best practice on a production site because of the performance of the cfdump tag due to its use of reflection (Runtime type introspection).

A better performing alternative is to output the information you want directly from the Error/Exception struct within a 'cfoutput' tag. This can be done by looking up the Error structure or the cfcatch structure in the ColdFusion docs to see what is available and what values you might want to output: Error: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusi...2c24-7d29.html CFCatch: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusi...2c24-7ec5.html

You can also use the following link to download an example CF custom tag that will give a similar error output as when using the cfdump tag on an error variable:
http://hostek.com/tutorials/ColdFusion/CF_OutputError.zip

Below is the custom tag's usage:

In the error handler specified in your 'cferror' tag:

<cf_OutputError Error="#Error#" />

The above code would replace:

<cfdump var="#Error#" />

Or, in a cfcatch block:

<cftry>
   ...
<cfcatch>
   <cf_OutputCFCatch CFCatch="#CFCatch#" />
</cfcatch>
</cftry>

Configure ColdFusion to Handle html and htm Files

In case you need to process ColdFusion code in your .htm or .html files, here is what you will need to do to get this to work. This is based on using ColdFusion on one of our dedicated server hosting accounts on a Windows server.

NOTE: This will affect every site on the server, so use cautiously.

First, you will need to edit the web.xml file located generally at C:\ColdFusion10\cfusion\wwwroot\WEB-INF

Open this file and look for coldfusion_mapping_1.

Scroll down the file until you see the last number increment like:

<servlet-mapping id="macromedia_mapping_15">

Then add the following right below the closing </servlet-mapping> of the last number increment item:

    <servlet-mapping id="coldfusion_mapping_16">
        <servlet-name>CfmServlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-mapping id="coldfusion_mapping_17">
        <servlet-name>CfmServlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>*.html/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-mapping id="coldfusion_mapping_18">
        <servlet-name>CfmServlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>*.htm</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-mapping id="coldfusion_mapping_19">
        <servlet-name>CfmServlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>*.htm/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

Save this file and exit.

Now in IIS, setup a mapping for the site:

1. In IIS 7+ click the server name section (right below the Start Page in the left-hand navigation), then double-click the Handler Mappings icon.
2. Select and "edit" the *.cfm record and copy the value of "executable". Now hit Cancel and then click Add Script Map.
3. Paste the executable value copied from the *.cfm record and type *.htm into the Request Path and hit OK.
4. Repeat the above steps to add a handler for *.html

Lastly, open the uriworkermap.properties file for your ColdFusion 10 IIS Connector in a text editor such as Notepad. On a standard ColdFusion installation this is located at:

C:\ColdFusion10\config\wsconfig\1\uriworkermap.properties

Copy the following lines, paste them at the bottom of the file, then save and close the file:

/*.html = cfusion
/*.htm = cfusion

Now restart the ColdFusion service and IIS. ColdFusion should begin processing CFML within htm/html files now.

Increase the ColdFusion Post Parameters Limit

ColdFusion 10

In ColdFusion 10, you can easily increase the value of ColdFusion's postParametersLimit via the ColdFusion Administrator. Once logged into the ColdFusion Administrator, click the Settings link then scroll to the bottom of the page. Set the value for the Post Parameters Limit to the desired limit and click the submit button.

ColdFusion 9 and below

To adjust the Post Parameters Limit setting in ColdFusion 9 and below, you will have to edit the server's neo-runtime.xml file which is located here on a standard installation:

C:\ColdFusion9\lib

Open that file in a text editor such as Notepad, then search for the postSizeLimit tag. It will look similar to this:

<var name='postSizeLimit'><number>100.0</number></var>

Immediately after that set of tags, paste this chunk of text:

<var name='postParametersLimit'><number>1000.0</number></var>

Once you've adjusted the file, you'll just need to save your changes and restart ColdFusion for the new setting to go into effect. Note: The value of 1000 is just an example, so you can increase it as needed.

Loading custom Java libraries (jar or class files) in ColdFusion 10

ColdFusion 10 makes it easy to load Java libraries into your ColdFusion application without having to restart ColdFusion. All that's required is your application define the 'THIS.javaSettings' attribute within the site's Application.cfc like below:

<cfset THIS.javaSettings = {LoadPaths = ["/javafiles/"],reloadOnChange=true,watchInterval=30}/>

The above code will check the "javafiles" directory in your Web root for 'jar' and 'class' files and make any libraries within the directory accessible from your ColdFusion application. ColdFusion will also check for changes to the files every 30 seconds and reload the libraries if it notices any changes to the files.

Reference: Adobe ColdFusion Documentation - Using a Java Class

How to handle ColdFusion Error Permission denied for creating Java object: coldfusion.server.ServiceFactory

If you are using Mura or using Transfer ORM and you get this error, Permission denied for creating Java object: coldfusion.server.ServiceFactory, you are likely using an outdated version of Mura and also are probably on a ColdFusion 9 server. The Transfer ORM component causing this issue has not been updated to work with ColdFusion 9. There is a quick fix though:

Find the file named CFMLVersion.cfc which should be at /wwwroot/requirements/transfer/com/factory.

Edit that file and find the line that has:

if(server.coldfusion.productversion.startsWith("8"))

And change that to:

if(server.coldfusion.productversion.startsWith("8") OR server.coldfusion.productversion.startsWith("9"))

Save the file and it should now work.

NOTE: Since this is likely running an outdated version of Mura, I would strongly suggest installing the latest version as the Blue River team has updated Mura's frameworks to make the software perform faster too.