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Ben Nadel at the New York ColdFusion User Group (Apr. 2008) with: Clark Valberg and Peter Bell and Rob Gonda and Nafisa Sabu
Ben Nadel at the New York ColdFusion User Group (Apr. 2008) with: Clark Valberg Peter Bell Rob Gonda Nafisa Sabu

I Don't Understand ColdFusion GetPageContext() And Include()

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Published in Comments (2)

I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out an error I was getting with the following code:

<!--- Include public style sheet. --->
<cfset GetPageContext().Include( "../../../linked/css/main.css" ) />

This line of code kept throwing the error:

java.io.FileNotFoundException

After literally an hour and a half of playing around with "../" combinations and outputting FileExists() results, I switched over to using a CFInclude tag:

<!--- Include public style sheet. --->
<cfinclude template="../../../linked/css/main.css" />

For some reason, this include works, and the include method of the GetPageContext() servlet does NOT work. I have no idea what this means. As I am not a professional Java programmer, I am not familiar with servlets and context objects. I don't know if it has something to do with web-visibility. I know that the include above were crossing over a virtual directory (an admin area was pulling the CSS file from the public site and the admin was in a virtual directory).

Who knows. I tried to Google some information about page context and I came up with this Java class, but that doesn't really help me understand. Maybe someone out there can help.

As part of my mentality, I was doing it this way so that the main.css file would be included without being parsed. As far as I know, a CFInclude tag will actually parse the file looking for ColdFusion code (even in a CSS file). I had no need to parse the file and was told that the Include() method would not do so.

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Reader Comments

1 Comments

"a CFInclude tag will actually parse the file looking for ColdFusion code (even in a CSS file)"

It doesn't unless it's a file with an extension that equates to a Coldfusion template i.e .cfm.

Try it yourself, cfinclude a css file. If CF was trying to parse the file you'd get errors being thrown when it encounters # symbols on styling blocks.

15,902 Comments

James,

Please take a look at the demo that I have set up. I think you are confused about evaluation of # signs vs. parsing of page looking for ColdFusion tags.

http://bennadel.com/index.cfm?dax=blog:250.view

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Ben Nadel