Socialpoints

We have a system that has to produce fairly complex personalized documents as output. We produce these as HTML, with the help of CFML of course. We found however that printing these direct could not really be handled by the combination of browser and printer especially as we had different paper sizes and printers to deal with. So we decided to convert the output to PDF and let Acrobat deal with the printing. The actual printing works well and is faster and easier to manage. The problem comes in converting the HTML to PDF. We are running on the latest patched version of CFMX7, but would have upgraded to 8 if this had solved the problems. What we found was that CFDOCUMENT did not correctly honour the CSS in our documents in fact it seemed buggy adding spaces at random to the output. We also tried a tag called CFX_PDF, but this also lacks sufficient CSS support. After trying several tools we settled on ActivePDF which seems to have very good and complete CSS support. Importantly ActivePDF was the only product that properly honoured CSS page breaks. Without this, producing multi-page documents from HTML on different printers on both A4 and Letter size paper is virtually impossible. It seems a great shame that Adobe has NOT produced the best tool for handling PDF in CF. I look forward to more investment from Adobe in this area for future releases.

I have been using fusebox for a few years now and really like it. I have a way of doing things which has become familiar and seems to do the job, but I wonder what other patterns there are. Here is mine.
I have a layout circuit which runs as a globalfuseaction, postprocess. This handles all the basic page stuff - HTML meta tags, linked css files, javascript files and including any constant elements of the page - title, footer, navigation etc. It will also pick up and render the main content generated by other circuits that have run for the current request. The circuit.xml file for this layout circuit will handle any logic to determine alternative layouts if required (such as popup windows or pages for print).
Business logic and database access is in cfcs.
All control of flow should be visible in the circuit files which means I will have some 'if' statements in the XML. Where possible I invoke cfc methods direct from the circuit.xml. I always use XFA's for all exit points from a fuseaction. One of my aims is that you should be able to open up the circuit.xml files only and understand the application at a reasonable level without the need to delve into actual code.

I would love to hear how other people commonly use fusebox.

As promised in my last entry, a new minor release of cfsftp (1.3.2) is now available to download that returns a query instead of an array when you call the dir method.

Please let me know if there are any issues with other server configurations. My test environment is connecting from windows to a Red Hat Linux server and it seems to work OK, but some users have had issues with other configurations.

Enjoy.

Several of the users of sftp.cfc have requested that it returns more than just an array of filenames in the 'dir' command.
The problem is that the additional information is returned in a string unix style, and it seems that different server OS's return this string slightly differently.
So I customised the sftp for one user, to parse out the details based on connecting to a redhat linux server (which is my test environment), but running the same code on a windows server did not work correctly.
I now have a version that does not try to parse the details but just returns them so that you can sort them out yourself according to whatever format your environment gives you. It returns a query rather than an array.
I'll publish this new version after the Christmas holidays although a couple of users have a pre-release version! Thank you to those of you that have tested it for me.

CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

Just saw this on a site as I surfed. Instead of the squiggly images or other variations which have accessibility issues, this variation just stated a simple maths question.

In the example I looked at it was 'Math Question: What is 3 + 3?: *' .

You would have to vary the question and possible the way it was asked but seemed like a neat solution that would also be accessible.