ColdFusion Error Thrown When Application.cfc Has Method Named "Trace"
Posted October 17, 2006 at 8:25 PM by Ben Nadel
The following is NOT the error. I am still debugging this and I am about to kill myself with frustration!
This was driiiiiving me crazy! I was testing events in the ColdFusion Application.cfc method when my OnError method kept firing during the OnApplicationEnd event. The error that I was getting was not helpful at in the least:
An exception occurred when invoking a event handler method from Application.cfc The method name is: onApplicationEnd.
I started to use the OnError method to CFDump the error to an html file. This is what I got:
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The detailed message was:
The method 'onApplicationEnd' could not be found in component.
But, my Application.cfc did IN FACT have an OnApplicationEnd method. Clearly something else was going on. But, how useless is that error? No tag context? It won't even tell me what line the error occurred on? To debug this I started commenting EVERYTHING out until the error went away. Then I started putting code back in. I finally narrowed it down to a method called "Trace". Trace was being invoked by other Application.cfc methods and was writing its arguments to a text file. I started to comment out everything in it until it was just this:
- <cffunction name="Trace">
- <cfreturn />
- </cffunction>
That was throwing an error! WTF right? The only thing I could possibly think of was that "Trace" was some sort of reserved word. So, I renamed it to "EventTrace":
- <cffunction name="EventTrace">
- <cfreturn />
- </cffunction>
And just like that, no more problems. I tried looking in the ColdFusion documentation and saw nothing about this method name being special or reserved in any way. And what's more, you can create a method named "Trace" outside of Application.cfc with out any issue. It seems to be reserved ONLY inside of the Application.cfc component. Crazy huh?
Reader Comments
Thats is a very odd error indeed.
Just throwing this in, but I also use a method called "trace" in my application. But actually the trace method definition isn't in the Application.cfc file, I cfinclude it in (mixin style). So that seems to have spared me the same problem, and might also offer you a way around that funky error.
Jordan,
I was incorrect about what was causing the error. Although maybe the Trace method only complicated things. I have taken it out and I am still getting errors (slightly different). It's driving me CRAZY!!!! ARG!
@Ben:
Have you tried stripping out all the logic in the onApplicationEnd?
Also, try dumping the class cache and re-starting your server. Perhaps there's a weird class caching issue occuring w/the Application.cfc.
Having same problem in developed CFC as well, although my code clearly defines the method.
Throws this error in CF8:
Error Message: The trace method was not found.
Error Detail: Either there are no methods with the specified method name and argument types, or the trace method is overloaded with argument types that ColdFusion cannot decipher reliably. ColdFusion found 0 methods that matched the provided arguments. If this is a Java object and you verified that the method exists, you may need to use the javacast function to reduce ambiguity.
@Keef,
Did you have a Trace method?
I'm going through the logs of an old application here and finding a similar error. I'm thinking it's because something named a method "get". Yep, just get. And I suspect that's causing problems when once the ColdFusion code is being ran in Java (for a lack of a better description of what happens as CF is written in Java)
"The get method was not found."
"Either there are no methods with the specified method name and argument types, or the get method is overloaded with argument types that ColdFusion cannot decipher reliably. ColdFusion found 0 methods that matched the provided arguments. If this is a Java object and you verified that the method exists, you may need to use the javacast function to reduce ambiguity."
In this case, it may be that the instance of the object doesn't have that method at the time it's being called. I don't know. But as much as I like the flexibility of things being loosely typed I wish CF had more reserved method names and keywords just to make sure things don't get mucked up.
