Styling The ColdFusion 8 WriteToBrowser CFImage Output

Posted July 20, 2007 at 4:22 PM

Tags: ColdFusion

The ColdFusion 8 has some amazing functionality, one feature of which is being able to write an image to the browser as an inline IMG tag:

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The problem with this is that it writes the IMG tag to the browser and doesn't give you any ability to add your own IMG attributes, including CSS or STYLE. This may or may not be a problem for people, but it would be nice to have access to the tag data.

This dilemma is actually fairly easy to overcome. The CFImage tag, in addition to creating the image object and saving to the file system, is really just writing to the page's content buffer, which is then flushed to the client along with everythign else. As such, we can intercept the content buffer write, modify it in any way we want, and then write the new IMG tag to the page's content buffer.

I have created ImageWriteToBrowserCustom(), a ColdFusion user defined function that takes your ColdFusion 8 image object and additional attribute values and writes the IMG tag for you. Here's what it might look like:

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Notice that ImageWriteToBrowserCustom() is taking the image that we read in via CFImage as well as the ALT, CLASS, and STYLE attributes. If we now look at the source code of the rendered page, we will get the following image tag (I have wrapped it for easy viewing):

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The image itself looks like this:

The user defined function that accomplishes this is actually fairly simple and just traps the IMG tag output using ColdFusion's CFSaveContent tag:

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I am sure (*hoping*) that eventually ColdFusion 8 will give us the ability to control the attributes of the rendered IMG tag, but for now, this seems like a decent solution. The one thing I don't like about it is that it requires the Output attribute of the CFFunction tag to be true; I really don't like having output in a function call, but I also didn't want to return a value since CFImage / WriteToBrowser doesn't return any values (and I wanted to keep in sync with that style.

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Reader Comments

While I didn't do this in the demo, this could probably be made more flexible by not actually defining the argument tags, but rather looping over the arguments and created name-value attributes for anything NOT named "Image". This way, you could just about add any attribute you wanted to (ex. onclick, onload).

Thats a nice idea and solution Ben. We can not make any change in this function now. but certainly in future.

@Rupesh,

Yeah, not a huge deal, but down the road, it would definitely be cool. Especially since I think I remember saying Ben Forta saying that all the AJAX stuff produces XHTML compliant code, and I think technically, all images need height/width attributes to be "standards compliant" (maybe).... not that that really matters to me so much, but just another selling point.

Don't forget that there are often many more attributes that could be used (like id="uniqueVal"). A simple solution might be to offer an attribute called xcode (or whatever) where it just adds the entire value to the resulting img tag as attribute=value pairs.

example:

xcode='alt="My IMage" id="myImage" class="imgRight"'

Just a thought.

Yes, definitely a good idea.

Once again great work Ben. But I have the problem to add attributes to a CF generated captcha image. With captcha u can not use the name attribute to cfimage tag. So I thought about using cfsavecontent, which returns one of the most weird errors:

The png" alt="" height="40" width="140" /> image format is not supported on this operating system. Use GetReadableImageFormats() and GetWriteableImageFormats() to see which image formats are supported.

I created a function for this:

<cffunction
name="writeCaptcha"
displayname="writeCaptcha"
hint="I will output the captcha image"
returntype="any">

<cfargument name="strCaptcha" type="string" required="false">

<cfset var ret = "">

<cfsavecontent variable="ret">

<cfoutput>

<cflock name="captcha" type="exclusive" timeout="20">

<cfimage
action="captcha"
height="40"
width="140"
text="#arguments.strCaptcha#"
difficulty="medium"
fonts="verdana,arial,times new roman,courier"
fontsize="20"
/>

</cflock>

</cfoutput>

</cfsavecontent>

<cfreturn ret/>
</cffunction>

Do you have any other suggestion, or a workaround so I can use your ImageWriteToBrowserCustom() function on captcha images?

@Alexander,

That's a funky error. I don't believe I tried to use this with CAPTCHA. If I can get some time, I'll take a looksee.

Just wanted to let you know that this code greatly helped me. On many occasions I have gotten frustrated with my non-functioning code, turned to Google for help and your site has always had an answer. Thank you!

Hi Ben, hi Matt,

now that I received your message, Matt, I was wondering why the hell is that code not working for me. So I tried this code once again on my personal machine at home and...well..it is working here perfectly. Strange, because both machines (company and at home are same). I guess I will look out for some hotfixes, that may be applied on my machine, already.

Thank you for getting me back on this.

Kind regards
Alex

I did install a ColdFusion patch on my server to fix another issue. Perhaps that would help?

More info here:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb403411

@Alexander,

Yeah, definitely look into the hot fixes. I know there were some that helped several image funkiness.

Great work yet again Ben! Whilst I didn't use this whole code, I copied some of your regex code for a similar problem with the lack of an alt attribute and unescaped ampersands in CFIMAGE for Railo 3.1.

Thanks!

:)

Great work! I use a jQuery solution that has worked quite well. The example uses a real image file and a CF-created one.

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<style>
.myImage { border:4px solid red; };
</style>
<cfimage name="cImg1" source="pic.jpg">
<cfset cImg2 = ImageNew("","100","100","grayscale")>
<span class="imgAddClass"><cfimage action="writeToBrowser" source="#cImg1#" format="jpg" quality="1"></span>
<span class="imgAddClass"><cfimage action="writeToBrowser" source="#cImg2#" format="jpg" quality="1"></span>
<script>$(".imgAddClass img").addClass("myImage").attr("alt","This is my image");</script>

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