Boyzoid's Blog & Stuff

As I mentioned here, CFCHART allows us point to an external file for the JSON configuration string, however, this file needs to be a plain text file - we cannot point to a ColdFusion file to generate the JSON configuration for us. Thanx to some help from Ray Camden, I figured out a way to 'trick' CFCHART into doing just that. I will admit, it is a bit of a kludge, but it works...and it works nicely.

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I thought I would take a break for talking about charting (but I will get back to it soon) to talk about some more 'small' enhancements to ColdFusion 10 that will make out lives just a tad bit easier.

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Here is a cool feature of the new charting in ColdFusion 10. As I have made mention of, the charting engine is using ZingChart 'under the hood' to generate the charts. ZingChart relies on a JSON string for its configuration - everything from what type of chart, to the data contained in a series, to the styling of the chart. When we use CFCHART, ColdFusion generates this JSON string for us. However, there is a way for us to tell ColdFusion what that JSON string should be.

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I have become quite enamored with the new charting engine in ColdFusion 10. However, there are some things that I don't love about them - its not that I hate or dislike them, I just think they can be better. One such thing is the default styling of the tooltips.

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One thing I have not played around with in recent versions of ColdFusion was cfchart . I simply have not had a need to do so. During lunch today, I was working on something that I hope to incorporate into one of my cf.Objective() presentations that required me to use the new charting engine in ColdFusion 10.

I do not want to give too much away - just in case it winds up falling flat - but here is a sample graph with which I was working.

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To continue my 'series' of posts about new features that may get over looked, I wanted to point out 2 pretty cool changes to the ColdFusion Administrator.

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Raise you hand if you ever had a need to reset the CF Administrator password - because you forgot it or took over a system where no one knows the password. If you are a ColdFusion developer and you do not have your hand raised...you are lying.

It's happened to all of us at some point in time, especially on systems where we rarely need to access the Administrator. By know you probably also know that there is a way to do this that involves editing some configuration files and restarting ColdFusion. But ColdFusion 10 now offers us a new, and much easier, way to reset the password.

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OK, here is a ColdFusion 10 feature that I like. I will admit, its not difficult to mimic this behavior, but its cool none-the-less.

We should all be aware of the fact that when you submit a form to ColdFusion for processing, and the form contains multiple form fields with the same name (a list of checkboxes, for example) that these values will be available to us as a comma-delimited list in the FORM scope. Typically, I wind up changing this value to an array as I find it easier to work with arrays.

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I am a little late on announcing this, but I, once again, have the honor of once again speaking at cf.Objective().

I am giving 2 presentations: one on how to set up your Business Model and one on how to create mobile apps using PhoneGap.

Dave Ferguson and I will also be doing a live broadcast of CFhour on Thursday night. Check out the rest of the schedule here.

On top of some of the 'big ticket' items in ColdFusion 10, there are also a lot of small langauge enhancements that will make it even easier to use ColdFusion. One such example is using for-in syntax in queries.

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