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Recent Blog Comments By Paul Rowe

• POIUtility.cfc Examples For Reading And Writing Excel Files In ColdFusion

  Posted on Apr 26, 2013 at 4:56 PM

  @Ben, In case you're interested in expanding the functionality, I added the following lines of code to a local copy of POIUtility.cfc so it would be able to open password-protected XLS files. Here's the code (in context) and an explanation of what else needs to happen for it to work. read more »

• Looking At Prototypal Inheritance To Determine Data Types In JavaScript

  Posted on Apr 18, 2013 at 10:07 AM

  @Ben, Yes, that would be the result. In JavaScript, you would end up with an Object class that has isBall, isBasketball, isBaseball, isSoccerBall, etc. The trade-off is having a function defined that will always return a boolean value at the cost of having all of those functions define... read more »

• Looking At Prototypal Inheritance To Determine Data Types In JavaScript

  Posted on Apr 12, 2013 at 10:13 AM

  I remember seeing something like this in SmallTalk, but it went far and above what you just described here. In the little that I learned of SmallTalk, it seemed typical that every class would define a function identifying itself (and any descendants) as an instance of that class. It would b... read more »

• CFFile Upload - The Filename, Directory Name, Or Volume Label Syntax Is Incorrect

  Posted on Mar 22, 2013 at 10:00 AM

  You know, I knew the CF would allow you to specify the filename, but I didn't tend to let it do that because I wanted to be able to handle different extensions (whether I was uploading an image or some sort of document). I would write logic to make sure that the filename I ended up with had the c... read more »

• The Lessons of Failure

  Posted on Mar 20, 2013 at 5:04 PM

  I can sympathize with this, though I haven't had quite the same experience myself. I was rewriting an application that used a technology that had just reached the end of its life cycle (MS wouldn't support it anymore). After writing the application, we upgraded the server and the technology... read more »

• Restarting Windows Explorer Without Restarting Your Computer

  Posted on Mar 20, 2013 at 4:35 PM

  @Di, You can also use the "Processes" tab in Windows Task Manager to forcibly end the "explorer" process.... read more »

• Restarting Windows Explorer Without Restarting Your Computer

  Posted on Mar 20, 2013 at 4:30 PM

  @Di, A variation on this is as follows (and this works in Win7, too): 1. Use Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Windows Task Manager. 2. Make sure the tab labeled "Applications" is selected. 3. Click the button labeled "New Task...". The "Create New Task" di... read more »

• Exploring Sample Software Application Layers And Responsibilities

  Posted on Feb 22, 2013 at 10:19 AM

  That makes a lot of sense, Ben. It's always a good idea to break your process down that way. Figure out the dependencies and the conditional activities. I had an instructor during my undergraduate education who taught O.O.P. (with C++). One of the code requirements for his class was that no... read more »

• Performing Query-Of-Queries Using ColdFusion 9's Query.cfc Component

  Posted on Feb 19, 2013 at 10:14 AM

  @Ben Having addParam and other functions that currently return void return references to the objects on which they operate would be nice. I'll admit that I appreciate how jQuery tends to do that (e.g., attr(attribute, value)) where the relevant inherent functions do not (c.f., setAttribute(v... read more »

• Thoroughly Document Your Use Of ColdFusion's CFHTMLHead Tag

  Posted on Feb 14, 2013 at 11:36 AM

  I was brought onto the team for a large application (over 10K scripts) and used cfhtmlhead in the application.cfm file to define the site bookmark and app icons. Just make sure that the content is not being included in AJAX responses.... read more »

• Creating Repeated Sequences With The Modulus (MOD) Operator

  Posted on Feb 14, 2013 at 10:38 AM

  @Ben That's about what the code would look like. I was thinking about, say, three left-floating DIVs with unordered lists containing the items you want to display. In that situation, your modulus divisor is not constant, but calculated based on the number of records. I suppose you coul... read more »

• Five Months Without Hungarian Notation And I'm Loving It

  Posted on Feb 13, 2013 at 6:49 PM

  When going through the CFWheels documentation, they define camelCase vs. PascalCase. When I first started programming, it was in QBasic, which was not case-sensitive. I taught myself (poorly, mind you) and I didn't use Hungarian Notation of any sort. It got frustrating because I had limited... read more »

• Using The Regular Expression Boundary Match \G To Find The End Of The Previous Match

  Posted on Feb 13, 2013 at 4:56 PM

  http://xkcd.com/1171/... read more »

• Performing Query-Of-Queries Using ColdFusion 9's Query.cfc Component

  Posted on Feb 13, 2013 at 4:00 PM

  @Ben I've used the cfquery component to great effect when writing my own model component. One of the frustrations in the past has been that you can't use cfqueryparam inside cfscript. The cfquery component allows you to include not just indexed parameters, but even named parameters. This is... read more »

• Creating Repeated Sequences With The Modulus (MOD) Operator

  Posted on Feb 13, 2013 at 3:22 PM

  Another particularly useful way to use the MOD operator is to break items up into an arbitrary number of columns. Say you have an unknown number of elements and you want to display them in three reasonably even columns, you would divide the number of elements by the number of columns, round up or... read more »

• Playing With Finite State Machines And ColdFusion Components

  Posted on Feb 13, 2013 at 1:40 PM

  I remember when I was doing my under-graduate work with FSM's that I decided to use a text file for storing the states and transitions when writing a LOGO interpreter. Were I to do the same thing now, I would use XML. You could easily bring that into ColdFusion and ensure that the different... read more »

• ColdFusion Supports HTTP Verbs PUT And DELETE (As Well As GET And POST)

  Posted on Feb 13, 2013 at 11:36 AM

  I have used the HEAD verb with unit-testing to verify that none of the links on a page (A HREF, LINK HREF, IMG SRC, SCRIPT SRC, etc.) are broken. It gets a lot less information than the full page, but that includes a status code like "200 OK" or "404 Not Found".... read more »