Ok so consider the following:

<CFFUNCTION name=”getByCriteria” access=”public” returntype=”query” output=”false” displayname=”" hint=”">
<CFARGUMENT name=”child_ocl_id” required=”false” >

This will result in an explicitly set variable that is set to “undefined” – the cfdump is thus:

Note the explicitly “undefined” status as well as (what my code was expecting) the “[empty string]” status

This stays the same whether you add a cfparam later or not, thus:

<CFFUNCTION name=”getByCriteria” access=”public” returntype=”query” output=”false” displayname=”" hint=”">
<CFARGUMENT name=”child_ocl_id” required=”false” >
<CFPARAM name=”arguments.child_ocl_id” default=”my new default” >

Note the above example isn’t what was in my code! It’s just a simple explanation of the behaviour I noticed. So just something to be aware of if you get unexplained “undefined” errors in your migration to Coldfusion 9.

The latest of these that I have implemented successfully is an excellent implementation of DaisyDiff by Daniel Mackey.  Though he has put together a direct Java jar implementation I have opted for his CFX_CompareHTML implementation because of it’s support for UTF-8 characters, he sent it on to me directly the last time I checked it wasn’t available on line (thanks Dan).

The free CFX_compareHTML does a DIFF analyses on formatted html, and then displays it as a combined diff output, this is useful for comparing before and after content for example and is comparable to tools such as (the very expensive) diffdoc.  Diffdoc costs about $4000 for a server license, and while it has more applications (i.e. as a desktop tool) for web based html comparison CFX_CompareHTML is more than adequate.

Once installed (the one downside of CFX tags is of course the need to install them and set their path in CF admin) it’s as simple as:

<cfx_CompareHTML left=“Some HTML content” right=“Some more HTML Content”>

Produces the following (nicked from CFDan.com – hope that’s ok Dan?!)

As I mentioned there are a couple of great tags/components in the CF open source world that I’ve used lately, and inspired by this excellent work I’ll be documenting them over the coming days.

So, here it is in all it’s glory:

Firstly I’ve assumed you have set up a snippet in cfeclipse as described here.

Now, you will notice there is an attribute int eh snippet description called “trigger text”, this is the the text that is used to specify your shortcut, it is however not used as the short cut itself but rather in combination with the actual snippet shortcut which at time of writing was CTRL + J.

So, having saved a snippet with a trigger text for example of “rk” you can cause the snippet to appear by typing anywhere on the page:

rk+CTRL+J

And your text should magically be replaced by the new snippet.

NB: I’ve included Coldfusion in the title because that’s the language I was using on the site in question, it’s not actually a Coldfusion process, but it should work fine on any IIS based CF system.

Firstly set up the IIS server so that it will run your robots.txt dynamically:

By default IIS will treat .txt files as non dynamic and will simply render the text in them if they are called.  We want to tell IIS to parse them in the same way they would parse .asp files.  Note there’s a handy example of how to parse robots.txt files with ASP.net here.

Get the path to the ASPX engine

This bit is adapted from ASP.net article mentioned above.

1. Open IIS and right click on your website and bring up the properties screen
2. Go to Home Directory > Configuration. You will be on the Mappings Tab.
3. Locate the .asp item and click Edit – Copy the path in the Executable Field and cancel out of that window. Make no changes here, you just need the path to the executable.
4. Now, check to see that .txt extension has not been defined (if it has you should check to see who has made this change and why before changing).
5. If it has not been defined then click ‘Add’, paste the path into the ‘Executable’ field, and ‘.txt’ into the ‘Extension’ field.  In the ‘Verbs’ field you should limit the verbs to ‘POST,GET’ - I haven’t investigated security implications for this, but limiting by default is a good idea IMO.  Both ‘Script engine’ and ‘Verify that file exists’ should be checked.
6. If it has been defined and you don’t mind changing it, obviously skip the add bit, click on the extension then click ‘Edit’ and make changes as above. 
7. Once you’ve saved, ‘OK out’ of the configuration section

Double check that Active Server Pages are enabled 

This is the bit that got me the other night, working on a new install there was no reason for Active Server Pages to be enabled, so when I was testing nothing happened.

In IIS again, this time click on Web Service Extensions (below the Web Sites folder), on the right there should appear a list of extensions.  Active Server Pages should be one of them, and it should be set to ‘Allowed’.  If not make it so!

Now, restart IIS and test it all works

Assuming you have done nothing yet to your old robots.txt (and it had something in it), when you now try to browse to it in the browser you should get a an unformatted dump of the text you had in it. This means IIS is now using Active Server Pages to parse the request, but there is no .asp code to parse so it just renders text.

From here you need to put some .asp logic in place so that it loads the appropriate information.

If you get a 404 error

It probably means you have not allowed ASP pages to execute, refer to instructions above. Remember to restart IIS again after doing this.

Download the tag here.

The manual here.