Great initiative: coldfusioncommunity.org! And I've just joined in!
http://www.coldfusioncommunity.org/profile/PabloVos
For those of you who live in Belgium: there is Coldfusion in Belgium group as well: http://www.coldfusioncommunity.org/group/coldfusioninbelgium
I want to evaluate the input of an email field with the database that I have to see if a user hasn't already registered and if the email is a valid one.
Using the new bind functions of CF8 are really nice to use. My websites are easier on the eyes, and more fun to navigate through the use of AJAX functionality.
Another example of how to use this fun stuff:
I recently needed a form that simulates a drill down function but I wanted to keep using plain Coldfusion functionality. Through the use of AJAX and CFSELECT's BIND function this was a breeze.
I can't seem to access Adobe.com from any of our European locations.
Having difficulties over there?
Update 13:00: It's fixed. Probably some gophers knawing on the cables.
I've created my first full Adobe Air application today with the Dreamweaver CS3 extension, using Javascript, Ajax, Coldfusion and HTML.
We use an application called Exact E-Synergy for storing our complete workflow, contact management, project management, etc. which is a really awesome webbased CRM-package (and so much more). I hate having to permanently have an Internet Explorer window open, so I developed this utility which list my workflow for the next week. It also highlights new items in yellow, and notifies people of new items that have arrived.
This is a simple trick when you need to pull a query and order the records randomly.
This code gets one random product from my database.
Besides currently being swamped in work, I'm trying out some new stuff. Lately I've been using jQuery a lot, which is something that "the more you use it, the more you'll love it". It's a great JS library that limits development time on those recurring javascripts and does a lot more.
This site is a simple example on getting started with CF, jQuery and Ajax.
If anyone else has got some CF + jQuery examples: I love to see them! Post them in the comments please.
http://www.365labs.net/cf_jquery/jquery_coldfusion_quickstart.htm
When designing SQL-server databases I like to use fields starting with an "N".
The "N" stands for NATIONAL, which overhere in Europe we have a lot of, umlauts, trema's, accents... you name it, we love it!
We use a lot of unicode data, things that VARCHAR has difficulties handling, but that's not the main reason I like to use the "N" fields.
The reason itself is that fields without the "N" are padded with spaces to meet their maximum when you output them. This causes a lot of problems when trying to create relations or output them to fields.
For example, an NVARCHAR at length 20 with content "BH 90210" outputs this way:
where VARCHAR at length 20
Where the value is padded with 12 more spaces to be used with VARCHAR...
Although we in Europe are aware of this when designing SQL databases, I still get a lot of SQL-databases that use the VARCHAR, TEXT or CHAR fields which are a nightmare to use in CF, because of the way you creating lookups and relations sometimes. I have "TRIM()" on speed dial here to create good content.
Another SQL trick I use quite a lot, which does solve most problems is:
It's good design to not use the "N", since an NCHAR takes twice the byte-space of a CHAR, but considering the above, please use "N" when creating SQL databases.
Didn't know if anyone noticed, but the Coldfusion 8 code-hint in DW-CS3 suggests "talbe" as a parameter. :)
Hope that Adobe is watching, and they'll fix it. I'm quite dependant on code hints since I'm rather stupid.
