Matthew Williams - CFDev (and admin!) - ColdFusion 7.x

Google brought down my house of cards

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:15:00 -0500

For almost three years now we've been running ColdFusion (well, really JRun) session based replication and failover on all of our hosted ColdFusion environs. Things were great! And then, we let google in the door to index our content. Things went from "great", to "why is this always down??". I spent far too much time looking at JVM settings, JRun settings, etc., but never really came up with a concrete answer as to what was happening. Ultimately, we'd see a deluge of errors about the failure of session replication in the log files and a complete breaking of failover and sometimes even the JRun -> IIS connector. Whilst searching for the session replication errors, I came across Sean Corfields postings across various blogs that replication just does not scale well, and that it remains a broken feature. Up until a few months ago, I'd argue this to be untrue. However, it appears that replication works... if you can manage to keep the amount of crap you throw into shared memory scopes down to a minimum. It's been 4 days since I've disabled session replication, and my servers have remained standing for an equal amount of time. We've been getting indexed by google (and others), and things are sailing along with nary a blip. Next stop, creating a guide for users that want/need session based failover that can be accomplished in code. Otherwise known as, "Help me Sean Corfield, you're my only hope!" ;).

PNG not showing using Built-in JRun webserver

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:45:00 -0500

My friend Michael blogged about an issue he was having with viewing PNG files when using the built-in JRun webserver. Just in case this should ever happen to you, here's the link. It appears I didn't get the link right. It's fixed now.

Error when entering lots of text view the body tag of a FarCry content item

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:27:00 -0500

I forgot that I've seen this before, but I had a client trying to enter text (quite a bit, in fact) and it kept failing. After finally getting all of the information on the incident, it turns out that the following error was being generated:


ErrorContext WDDX packet parse error at line 1, column 32001.
   Message WDDX packet parse error at line 1, column 32001. XML
   document structures must start and end within the same entity..
   StackTrace coldfusion.wddx.WddxDeserializationException: WDDX
   packet parse error at line 1, column 32001. XML document
   structures must start and end within the same entity

I google'd around a bit before I found the answer. We're storing the body field as a CLOB (at least, I'm pretty sure that's what it is). The default buffer size for this in the ColdFusion administrator is 32k. My text input went beyond that. Whoops. So, I made sure to check the box for CLOB (and turned on BLOB for good measure) and set the size to 128k. Problem solved, and now they can enter a very long string of text into the database. Just throwing this out there in case anyone else stumbles upon this issue.

Quick and dirty uptime monitor

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:52:00 -0500

Although we use FusionReactor to determine the health of our servers on our team, the environment as a whole is still monitored by another group. And they cannot access FusionReactor. Our previous method of monitoring just a URL worked fine when the servers were not clustered. Now, however, you can't really be sure what instance you're on. Therefore, we get false up/down messages for a specific instance. What I've done is this, I've got a new monitor.cfm file such as the one below:



	System = createObject("java","java.lang.System");
    JRun = createObject("java","jrunx.kernel.JRun");



	Instance:  #this_servername#

	Server Name: #cgi.Server_Name#




	

	












		

SOMEINSTANCE 1 - status DownUp

	#cfhttp.filecontent#

This code calls out to a file sitting within the instances built-in web server path. Since I need to leave this enabled to effectively manage the instance anyway, it's a good way to test that it's "alive". That monitor.cfm file contains:



	System = createObject("java","java.lang.System");
    JRun = createObject("java","jrunx.kernel.JRun");





Uptime

#uptime.days# Day(s) #uptime.hours# Hour(s) #uptime.minutes# Minute(s)



Instance:  #this_servername#

This display the instance information, and uses the UDF duration call (from CFLIB) to get the uptime count for the server. This information is then used within the first monitor call to display uptime status. Why bother? Well, I need some type of text on the page to tell the monitor (soon to be Nagios) that my instances are up. And near as I can tell, this is the only accurate way to do so. It's not pretty, I admit, but it gets the job done.

FarCry 4 formtools issues

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 12:58:00 -0500

Here's a strange one that I came across yesterday. I was working on making a new site available for some community type work (www.fouroakskidskampus.com), when I found an issue with the default FarCrycms plugin. I'll post the code, see if you can spot the error.

The above was pulled from plugins/farcrycms/packages/types/dmEvent.cfc. It was not displaying any webskins, even though they were in the correct path. Placing new webskins in the project folder failed as well. It's only when the webskins existed in the core folders that you actually were able to see them.

This next was pulled from plugins/farcrycms/packages/types/dmNews.cfc. Did you see it? It's not real blatant. Alright, this is where it's at, if you notice that ftseq in dmNews does not skip a sequence. The sequence in dmEvent DOES have a gap. Odd, but that's what seemed to break it. Renaming "ftseq=5" to "ftseq=4" fixed the issue. Groovy, baby.

FarCry plugin breakdown - Part III

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:35:00 -0500

Let's finish this up with Part 3. We only have two things to look at yet, and that's our Rule and webskin.

The Rule



	
	
	
	

	
	
	
	
	 
		
	
		if (len(stobj.intro))
			arrayAppend(request.aInvocations,stobj.intro);
		stInvoke.objectID = stData.ObjectID;
		stInvoke.typename = application.types.massMailerList.typepath;
		stInvoke.method = stObj.displayMethod;
		arrayAppend(request.aInvocations,stInvoke);

Not too complicated, and once again, formtools comes to our rescue! To get a real breadth of what can be done with rules, you really should take a look at the existing core and farcrycms rules. Some of them have much more functionality than what was required for this rule.

Basically, if you want to have something displayed on the screen, you need to make a cfproperty for it. The usual formtools ideas apply. The items I required were the ID of the list, and the name of the webskin to display it. Formtools can grab this list of webskins for you with the fttype="webskin".

The real magic is in the execute fucntion. It will create our stObj (which the webskin will use), and also invoke the webskin to be used. To be frank, I've not dug into the internals much within rules. This one will get the job done, but I don't have the greatest of knowledge of this piece of FarCry.

The webskin

The essence of the skin is to display two form fields, name and address, and submit this information as a aObjectID into the massMailerList. The nifty drag-n-drop display does this for us, so I simply "borrowed" those pieces to pull this of.






























	

	
	

	
	





	



	
	
	
	
	
							
			
			
			
			
				
			
					
				
						
				
				
				
				
			
			
			
			
		
			
			
			
						
			
										
					
			
			
			
			
		
	
	




	formObj.primaryHash = stObj.objectid;
	formObj.primaryNoHash = replace(formObj.primaryHash,'-','','all');
	formObj.userObjHash = createuuid();
	formObj.userObjNoHash = replace(formObj.userObjHash,'-','','all');




	Your email address has been added to the list!


	Name: 
	Email:

What we have is a call to formtools, supplied with our main object (massMailerList) and our attachment (massMailerUser). This code was wrought from within library.cfm. If you haven't already looked, it would be a great place to learn more about how the open library function works. I don't have any validation for the email field, yet. That's comming down the line.

Hopefully this makes this a little bit clearer. Or, at the very least, steers someone in the right direction.

FarCry plugin breakdown - Part II

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:28:00 -0500

First, an addendum. Matthew Bryant pointed out that I had forgetton wrap my objectAdmin tag within an <admin> call. This would explain why my wizzardStep and CSS formating wasn't happening correctly. The updated zip can be found at this location

Let's begin Part II by looking at the customadmin files. These files are responsible for generating the menu at the top of the FarCry administrator, and for providing the links on the left hand pane.

First up, the massMailer.xml:

FarCry gives you the ability merge changes to the look and feel of the webtop via XML files. The above should be fairly straightforward to follow.

Section - Creates a new tab within the webtop
Subsection - Creates the subsection within the specified tab. More than one subsection may be created, and a drop down list of choices will be presented if more than one subsection exists.
Menu - The navigation for the subsection
Menuitem - Navigation links within the subsection
- Link - The FarCry custom admin parser
- Module - The location of your customadmin files. In this case, customadmin/massMailerxxx.cfm
- Plugin - The name of the plugin for the module

Now, let's look at the files behind the link from above:

Let's start our simplest object, the massMailerUser. We need to first import the formtools and admin tags. The <admin></admin> tags allows to setup nifty things like pagination, and also bring along page styling. The formtools tags will automagically style the inputs on our pages based on the CFCs we created before. Neat, huh?

We need a call to objectAdmin to display our main menu details. The arguments are:

Title - The title displayed at the top of the details page
Typename - Very important! This is the type we plan to display
Columnlist - Comma seperated list of list columns to display. This could be any column within the type specific database table. Label, action, and datetimecreated are the default
SortableColumns - Uh... no further explanation required
lFilterFields - Fields on which to allow filters (restrict results)
plugin - Plugin to use as a base
sqlorderby - Order in which records are displayed in the details page

This set of options should see us through most of what we need to get done. The massMailerList uses much the same call, just a different typename. Things get different for massMailer however.

There is two things of note here. One is the array of buttons. You can override most of the default behavior of FarCry, and in this case, we need to add the "Send" email functionality. You will need to delve into objectAdmin and typeAdmin to sort out what values are expected here.

The other thing to note is our send functionality. It waits for the form to submit with our "Send" value, then calls to our plugins/massMailer/packages/types/massMailer.cfc with the objectID of the particular massMailer. If you recall from part one, there's a function within our CFC to handle this call, along with the send.cfm file.

Set up muliple instances for just one website - caveats

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 11:11:00 -0500

To expand upon this earlier post, when you map multiple instances within the same website (via virtual webs), items that use CFCHART will break. To make sure that the correct CFIDE is called when calling things like cfform, cfchart, etc. you need to make these modifications (thanks to Bruce Purcell)

In {cfmx-root}/lib/neo-graphing.xml
Change /CFIDE/GraphData.cfm to /somesite/CFIDE/GraphData.cfm
In {cfmx-root}/wwwroot/WEB-INF/web.xml
Change /CFIDE/GraphData.cfm to /somesite/CFIDE/GraphData.cfm

In addition, we were experiencing issues with session replication when users were moving between virtual webs within the same site. The fix for this is to place this code into a normal index.html template, and ensure that this template is called first when entering your site.

FarCry plugin breakdown - Part I

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:54:00 -0500

I promised a breakdown, and so it shall be writ. This first segment is going to analyze the newly created objects. If I have wherewithal to finish tonight, we'll move along to the administrator addon.

Let's start with our objects then:

massMailer - This object will hold all the information about our email. Things like message body, subject, from, to, and the massMailerList objects.
massMailerList - This object contains the name of the list, and holds massMailerUser objects.
massMailerUser - This object contains the name, email address, and dateTime stamp when the object was created.

Now let's look at the code. We'll start with the massMailerUser.

Hmm... so what does THAT mean?? Let's break this object down. Formtools will generate our object administration page for us, but it needs some help to get along.

ftSeq - Numeric sequence that you wish the fields to be displayed in
ftFieldset - Gives "groups" within a given page. Usually denoted by a horizontal line
ftwizardSet - Should give pagination, but it isn't working (for me) at this time
name - Name for the object to be created in the database
ftLabel - Label to displayed in the admin
type - Type for database creation
hint - Typical component hint. Although I think there's a way to give context sensitive help, I just haven't explored it yet.
required - No need for explanation, right?
other ft types - Not going to into these in detail. There are several examples in the core for working with date/time types with the supplied date/time picker.

Next up, our massMailerList object

Pretty much more of the same, EXCEPT, for this little gem. Notice that my aObjectIDs is of type array. This type MUST have an ftJoin attribute applied. You would specify a component here that you would like to have data populated from. In our case it is massMailerUser. But it could easily be dmImage (default supplied image library) or dmFile (default supplied file library). Heck, it can even be a comma separated list of any of these things.

So what happens when you add this type of field? Formtools will generate a button for you to click, called open library. This will pop open a window, and you will be given a choice of various tabs. In the main view, you can drag the massMailerUser (or image, or file, or whatever) objects from the right hand pane to the left hand pane. And that's it, you're done. You've now attached objects as an array to your massMailerList object. And you didn't even have to write any code!

This leaves us with massMailer

Again, more of the same. Except we also used a rich text for generation of our "Pretty" email body. Examples of such types exist in the core. Two things worth noting is the send function and the array of massMailerList(s). I plan to fully expound upon this in part II or III, but for now, know that it's there for us when it comes time to send out our mass mail!

Oh, and thank the heavens for FireFox's built in spell checker... it at least keeps these posts from being slightly more legible than I could manage without it.

My First Farcry Plugin... it's done, and here it is

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:54:00 -0500

Alrighty. I've created a zip of the plugin, and it will be available from here to download.

Installation instructions:

1) Install the latest version of FarCry Beta from either Jeff Coughlin's site or from the FarCry CMS page. Pertinent installation information can be found at their respective sites. 2) Modify your project//www/Application.cfm so that the plugins list includes massMailer in the list. This is a comma delimited list. 3) Open the FarCry admin and click on the Admin tab. Select COAPI from the dropdown list, and then click types. Deploy the three massMailer types. Next click rules, and deploy the massMailer rule.

Usage

Example 1: You want to have a form add a user to an email distribution list. 1) Open the FarCry admin and click on the Mass Mailer tab. 2) Click (in the left hand pane) the Mass Mailer List to create a new list. 3) Click Add to create a new List. Each List has two properties, a name, and a list of emails. We'll only worry about the name for now. Give the List a name, and Save. 4) Open a window to view your FarCry site. Switch to Design Mode, and click on a container where you'd like the new form to reside. 5) Choose the Mass Mailer Rule from the list, and add it to the container using the Commit button. This should take you to the next step. From here, select the Display Method (one is supplied for you), and use the Open Library to add a list. You can add only one list per rule! I'm thinking of modifying this in the future, but for now it stays. Save the results. 6) Refresh the page, and you should now see a form containing the Name and Email fields. Complete the form, and once submitted, it will add a new entry to your list (as well as create a new massMailerUser object). To verify, open the FarCry admin/Mass Mailer Tab and edit the Mass Mailer List you just created. Example 2: 1) Follow steps 1-3 above. While still in the open library, you can choose to attach a new object. 2) Otherwise, click Mass Mailer User, add the new user, and then attach using the open library from Mass Mailer List.

Sending Mail

1) Open the FarCry admin, and click the Mass Mailer tab. 2) Click on the Mass Mailer link in the left hand pane. And then click Add from the top navigation. 3) Fill out the form fields as required. You need, at minimum, the Subject and List (open library). You can add as many lists as you like to the email. 4) There is a plan to add an attachment to the emails, but that's slated for the next release. 5) Save the object. Then select the object, and from the top/central navigation buttons, click Send. The end! Tomorrow (or as time permits) I'll break down the objects and the "Why" of it.

My First Farcry... well, plugin is the term now, take 3.1

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 17:44:00 -0500

Alright. We have successful email creation in place. You can also assign a rule and a webskin to the rule. The final piece is adding the massMailerUser object to the massMailerList object via an online form. This should be completed tonight, family willing, and I'll start the break down/analysis of what each file does, and why. Thank you ray for the use of code tags, which ya'll will see extensive use of tomorrow ;). Update: so close to the finish I can almost taste it... however, it's late. I need to sit in on performance tests tomorrow morning, so it will need to wait until tomorrow afternoon to finish up. The good news, though, is it works! I need to cull the deadwood of copied functions from the core/admin/facade/library.cfm that will not be used, but it appears that everything is working as it should. Yay!

My First FarCry library take 3

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 01:23:00 -0500

I finally got some free time to move this project towards completion. And then things went to heck in a handbasket when Daemon decided to change around the code base ;). So, what has changed is that farcry_core is now just core. Projects have moved to a projects folder. And farcry_lib is now plugins. That last is what really affected me. I had to change my customadmin and customlists to reflect this change. As Stephen mentioned in previous comments, Formtools is just too sexy for itself. I went the easy route for the time being, but will climb the hard road in time. My three objects still exist, one calling the other using the open library feature of Formtools. The only drawback I can fore see is there is no way to select multiple objects at a time. I'll see if anyone has extended this yet. This is now working smashingly. Next up, setup the special columns required to send mail through the admin. Then, finally, adding users to lists via the web signup form. Update: And we have success! You now create a user. Assign the user to a list(s). Assign that list to an email to be distributed, and then send. Full source to be fourth coming as soon as the rule (which can be dropped into a page) and webskin templates are setup. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. Update 2: The rule for adding the massMailer to a page has been created (which was pretty simple). Now the tough part... adding the formtools functionality to the webskin. Since we're attaching a new objectid into the massMailerList object, seems to be the most practical way of doing so. Of course, we could do it by straight database manipulation, but where's the fun in that ;).

My First FarCry library take 2

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 02:12:00 -0500

So, I'm going to need three different objects to accomplish this task. One massMailer, massMailerList and massMailerUser. The massMailer object is the main object, and it contains fields for From, Body, To (shown as a dropdown, but really a link to the massMailerList object), etc. The massMailerList object contains a title, and an array of massMailerUser objects. The massMailerUser object contains things like name, email, date added. Whew. These objects have been deployed, and their associated table data has been created. Next up, creating the display methods and tweaking code so that Formtools displays the object properties correctly. However, given the lateness of the hour, it's not happening tonight. Update: Sorry to those who are watching in anticipation of an early completion. Due to sick family members, I can't really finish this up until tomorrow night. On that note... sleep awaits.

Next up on deck... My First FarCry lib!

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 23:55:00 -0500

I'll add to this post, hopefully to completion, tomorrow. At one point, I had a fairly decent mass mailer set up in FarCry 2.x/3.x. I left that employer but still have most of the code required. It was a modification of the dmEmail object to allow for the a list of emails to be inserted into a variable via CFFILE. You'd upload the list to the server, then import said list to an array. So, I'm working on site for my son's preschool, and it would be helpful to have similar functionality. But, with a twist. I want the library to capture emails into subscription pools, then use these pools to send out the various emails. The idea being that those looking to get updates from the preschool will join one (or more) of the mailing lists, then receive updates based on the list that was joined. I'll be placing this into the new FarCry 4.0 library feature and making the code available here, and on the FarCry lists/wiki. Update: I've seriously underestimated this task. Much has changed under the hood of FarCry that I'm only just getting back into. At the moment, the extension to formtools has been created. Dang is that a cool new feature ;). I've got the main display item for Mass Mail distribution 90% complete. But, I've run into an issue of making aObjectIDs for the underlying list emails that gets called. This has REALLY changed, and will take a little more time to deconstruct. It's late, I'm off for now. Update2: Please bear with me. There's not much going to be accomplished today. I'll try finishing up tonight, but we'll take the day as it comes.

Installing FarCry as a virtual site in IIS

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 23:16:00 -0500

This is specific to the FarCry 4.0 release. At the time of this writing, you can grab it from http://www.jeffcoughlin.com/?pg=11. From this site, be sure to get farcry_core, fourq, farcry_mollio, farcry_lib.farcrycms.

First, our directory structure. Unzip the zips into
C:\farcry40\farcry_core
C:\farcry40\fourq
C:\farcry40\farcry_mollio
C:\farcry40\farcry_lib\farcrycms

You will need to create a project folder. Create a copy of farcry_mollio, and place it into either: C:\farcry40\somesite Or C:\websites\somesite

If the folder is placed outside of the FarCry root, additional steps will need to be followed. Those steps will be listed below. Follow the steps below to complete the installation. Please note that the folder paths used are merely provided as an example.

Open the IIS administrator. Add the virtual site somesite off of your main domain website. Eg. Mainsite.com/somesite. To do this, right click the website to modify, and click New->Virtual Directory.
Fill in the Alias as somesite, click Next. Path will be either C:\farcry40\somesite\www, or the optional folder outside of farcry at C:\websitse\somesite\www.
Choose access permissions as appropriate for your environment. Click Next then Finish to continue.
Create a new virtual directory in a similar fashion for farcry. Right click the newly created somesite folder and click New->Virtual Directory. The alias is farcry and the path is C:\farcry40\farcry_core\admin.
Create a new database user/schema/database/etc to hold the FarCry table information. This document is database agnostic, and assumes the user has some means of affecting these changes. Regardless, FarCry should have its own schema/database to reside in.
Log into the ColdFusion (CF for short) administrator and create mapping for a logical path of /farcry and directory path of C:\farcry40.
Optional - if the project folder is outside of the FarCry folder, create a mapping for a logical path of /farcry/somesite and a directory path of C:\websites\somesite.
Create a new CF datasource called somesite_farcry pointing to the database/schema created in step 5.
And, this was submitted to the FarCry list... change somesite\www\install\FlightCheck.cfc to:
<cfinclude template="/#arguments.siteName#/install/ping/index.cfm" />
At this point you should now be ready to run the FarCry installation scripts. Open a browser to mainsite.com/somesite/install. If running from somewhere other than localhost, be sure to edit C:\farcry40\somesite\www\install\Application.cfm (or C:\websites\somesite\www\install\Application.cfm) to reflect your IP.
Fill in the required fields. The application name must match the folder name you've created. In this case it is somesite. Fill in the DSN name, and the database type. The website mapping should be /somesite and the FarCry mapping should be /somesite/farcry. Choose to install the farcrycms library, and if in production, remove the installation folder.
At this point, everthing should be ready to go. Click Install and watch the output of the screen. If any errors occur, either report them back to the FarCry mailing list, or investigate where the installer indicates there to be a problem.
Add this line to somesite\config\_serverSpecificVars.cfm: <cfset application.url.webroot = "/somesite">