Team Ravenglass

Coldfusion, jQuery, Mobile, SQL

Sending MultiPart Email Messages with ColdFusion

Jan 4

posted by Cindi Vinette in Coldfusion | 1 Comments Bookmark and Share

Here is an example of how to send a multipart email message with ColdFusion:

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1<cfmail subject="MultiPart Email Test" type="text/html" to="you@test.com" from="someone@test.com">
2 <cfmailpart type="text/plain">
3 Plain text goes here
4 </cfmailpart>
5 <cfmailpart type="text/html">
6 HTML version goes here
7 </cfmailpart>
8</cfmail>

It's important that you put the text-only version of the message FIRST in the mailpart tag list, otherwise GMail will always display the text-only version of the email message and never display the HTML version of the message!

This entry was posted on January 4, 2010 at 11:45 AM and has received 704 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Case sensitive "LIKE" comparison in ColdFusion Query of Queries

Aug 26

posted by Cindi Vinette in Coldfusion | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

I encountered an unexpected behavior while trying to remove all records with hotmail email adresses from a query of some clients.

The query of queries was pretty simple:

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1<cfset tmpQry = arguments.qSourceData>
2<cfquery name="returnQueryNoHotmail" dbtype="query">
3    select * from tmpQry
4    where email not like '%@hotmail.com%'
5</cfquery>
6<cfset rtnQuery = returnQueryNoHotmail>

 

The problem that I found was that it was removing SOME of the records with hotmail addresses, but not all. Upon further inspection of the data, I found that the records that were not being matched with this query all had Hotmail addresses in uppercase - for example: JOHN123@HOTMAIL.COM instead of john123@hotmail.com.

So the issue here is that the LIKE condition in a query of a query in ColdFusion 8 is case sensitive.

To fix this, and make sure that I get any other "hotmail.com" record, I used the LOWER() function, which would match either Hotmail.com, HOTMAIL.COM, hotmail.com, hotmail.COM or any other combination of the characters.

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1<cfset tmpQry = arguments.qSourceData>
2<cfquery name="returnQueryNoHotmail" dbtype="query">
3    select * from tmpQry
4    where lower(email) not like '%@hotmail.com%'
5</cfquery>
6<cfset rtnQuery = returnQueryNoHotmail>

 

Additionally, you can also use regular expressions for your LIKE comparison. For example, if you want to get all clients whose first name started with the letter "E" through the letter "M", you could write it like this:

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1<cfquery name="qOq" dbtype="query">
2    select * from qClients where first_name like '[E-Me-m]%'
3</cfquery>

Pretty cool!

You can see the full reference on query of queries here in the docs (which is where I found the answer):
http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/htmldocs/help.html?content=using_recordsets_7.html

 

This entry was posted on August 26, 2009 at 10:49 AM and has received 1444 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Easy way to get the SQL of a query

Aug 13

posted by Cindi Vinette in Coldfusion | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

I can't count the number of times that I have needed to see the actual SQL that was used in a query, since the query is often built dynamically and based on several different conditions that are passed in.

The easy way to do this is to save the query to a result variable and the dump the sql of the result variable.

Example:

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1<cfquery name="myQuery" datasource="#dsn#" result="myQueryResult">
2&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;select client_id, first_name, last_name, email from clients
3&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;where
4&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<cfif bSubscribed eq 1>
5&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;email_authorized = 1
6&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<cfelse>
7&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;email_authorized = 0
8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</cfif>
9</cfquery>
10
11<!--- dump the sql that was used for the query --->
12<cfoutput>#myQueryResult.sql#</cfoutput>

That's it!

This entry was posted on August 13, 2009 at 9:32 AM and has received 568 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

CFMenu - Easy as Pie

Aug 10

posted by Cindi Vinette in Coldfusion | 2 Comments Bookmark and Share

I have to say that I love the new <cfmenu> tag in ColdFusion 8. I found it to be the perfect solution for an intranet menu that has grown and grown and grown over time to be a huge list of text links - a list that was unreadable to me, even though I used the menu all the time every day. It got to the point that I literally had to stop for a few seconds to find a link that I used on a very regular basis because it was so buried in text.

Not very user-friendly!

[More]

This entry was posted on August 10, 2009 at 12:52 PM and has received 2040 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

Getting the data type of a ColdFusion query column

May 28

posted by Cindi Vinette in Coldfusion | 3 Comments Bookmark and Share

I was looking for a way to get the data type of a query column so that I could apply different logic based on the type. I found the solution for this on another blog: http://www.bennadel.com/blog/308-Ask-Ben-Finding-The-SQL-Data-Type-Of-A-ColdFusion-Query-Column.htm

Using the GetMetaData() function, you can pass in a query object and return an array of structures that contains each column in the query and information about that column. Very useful!!

Basically, to use the function, you just pass in the query name:

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1<cfset arrMetaData = GetMetaData(myQuery)>

I have expanded on the original blog entry a little bit by creating a function that I placed in my generic Utilities component to be used throughout the application.

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This entry was posted on May 28, 2009 at 1:11 PM and has received 2118 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.

Use AttributeCollection for Custom Tags to Reduce Coding and Errors

May 11

posted by Cindi Vinette in Coldfusion | 1 Comments Bookmark and Share

I've recently started using the attributeCollection attribute for passing attributes to a custom tag instead of the name=value approach. I've found that this approach is much easier to read, to change and is less error prone, especially when your code will require you to use different custom tags with that use the same attributes, depending on the if statement match.

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This entry was posted on May 11, 2009 at 1:04 PM and has received 477 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Page Numbers in clickable boxes are easier to use

Feb 24

posted by Cindi Vinette in Usability, CSS | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

I have to say that I really like the usability of page numbers (or alpha lists) in clickable boxes. They are much easier to use/select than just the one-character links, which are often teeny tiny and too close together. So here is an example of how to clickable boxes with CSS - you just have to define the style, then wrap all the links in a div with the "pagination" class. 

Example CSS: 

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1/* ------------------------------------------------------- */
2div.pagination {padding:3px; margin:3px; text-align:left; font-size:11px; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;}
3
4div.pagination a, div.pagination a:visited {padding: 2px 5px 2px 5px; margin-right: 2px; background: transparent; border: 1px solid #cccccc; text-decoration: none; color: #004499;}
5
6div.pagination a:hover, div.pagination a:active { border: 1px solid #cccccc; color: #000000; background-color: #dddddd;}
7
8div.pagination span.current a:link, div.pagination span.current a:visted { color: #004499; padding: 2px 5px 2px 5px; margin-right: 4px; font-weight: bold; border: 1px solid #e0d9b8; background-color: #edeadb;}
9
10div.pagination span.disabled {padding: 2px 5px 2px 5px; margin-right: 2px; border: 1px solid #e0d9b8; color: #004499; background-color: transparent;}
11/* ------------------------------------------------------- */

Example HTML/ColdFusion code:

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1<cfoutput>
2 <div class="pagination">
3 Port Index:&nbsp;&nbsp;
4 <cfloop list="#alphaList#" index="thisAlpha">
5 <cfif alpha neq thisAlpha>
6 <a href="#cgi.SCRIPT_NAME#?#cgi.QUERY_STRING#&alpha=#thisAlpha#">#thisAlpha#</a>
7 <cfelse>
8 <span class="current"><a href="#cgi.SCRIPT_NAME#?#cgi.QUERY_STRING#&alpha=#thisAlpha#">#thisAlpha#</a></span>
9 </cfif>
10 </cfloop>
11 </div>
12</cfoutput>

This entry was posted on February 24, 2009 at 1:42 PM and has received 586 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Faster form fields to function

Dec 16

posted by Cindi Vinette in Coldfusion | 2 Comments Bookmark and Share

Here's an easier way to pass in the values of a form submission to a function. Instead of defining each form field as an argument to be passed into the function, you can use the form structure as the argument itself.

Example Old Code:

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1<cfscript>
2 this.myFunction(first_name='#form.first_name#', last_name='#form.last_name#', phone='#form.phone#');
3</cfscript>
4
5<cffunction name="myFunction">
6
7<cfargument name="first_name" type="string" required="no" default="">
8<cfargument name="last_name" type="string" required="no" default="">
9<cfargument name="phone" type="string" required="no" default="">
10
11<cfquery datasource="myDSN">
12 insert into customers (first_name, last_name, phone)
13 values ('#arguments.first_name#', '#arguments.last_name#', '#arguments.phone#')
14</cfquery>
15
16<cfreturn>
17</cffunction>


Example New Code with form passed as a structure to the function:

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1<cfscript>
2 this.myFunction(form);
3</cfscript>
4
5<cffunction name="myFunction">
6<cfargument name="myForm" type="struct" >
7
8<cfquery datasource="myDSN">
9 insert into customers (first_name, last_name, phone)
10 values ('#arguments.myForm.first_name#', '#arguments.myForm.last_name#', '#arguments.myForm.phone#')
11</cfquery>
12
13<cfreturn>
14</cffunction>


That's it - less typing, less room for error, and when you add/change a form field, you only have to change it in the form and in the function itself!

Cindi V.

This entry was posted on December 16, 2008 at 11:01 AM and has received 385 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.