Phillip Gagnon

Copying Stored Procedures From one server to another

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:52:00-0400

In our coding environment, like most, we have a development environment and a production environment. As we have been making the move to use more stored procedures and less queries, we have run into an issue where the procs do not get synchronized between the development (dev) and live server. [More]

ColdFusion and Google Talk - The missing link

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:45:00-0400

After spending several hours trying to get this to work, I was finally able to get ColdFusion 7 and Google Talk to communicate with each other. I steped through the tutorial by Ben Forta on the sys con website, and at then end, was unable to get the event gateway running. It just "stalled" and said starting. It never threw an error (in the eventgateway.log or the exception.log) nor connected; it just said "starting..." but never started. Then I stumbled on this little gem. I must have looked at 10 different blogs before I found this site on Adobe (thanks Google) All you have to do is replace the smack.jar with this one, and there is no problem. http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=b39b42b5&sliceId=1 I hope this helps!

How To Read A Calyx Point File in ColdFusion

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:31:00-0400

Well, after the huge success of my last custom tag, I decided to write another. This time, it is incredibly useful, but at the same time completely useless (instead of just partially useless). I'll explain the useful part first.

This tag is designed to read and decrypt a file, but not just any file. In my time working for a large mortgage company, I discovered that the majority of mortgage brokers and loan officers use a piece of software called Calyx Point to manage their loans. Point stores its files on the computer in an "encrypted" format. I did manage to find a plug-in that would read a Point file, but only in VB6. Obviously, this did me no good. So I managed to "crack" the encryption, and wrapped the whole thing in a custom tag. Now, you (or anyone else for that matter) can now process and read Point files via the web using ColdFusion. This saves the broker(s) from having to retype all the borrower/loan information twice (i.e. once in Point, and once on your site, now just once in Calyx Point)

[More]

CF_GenInserts - Way Cool Custom Tag

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:59:00-0400

So the other day, I was talking with a friend of mine and we came up with a problem. We were both working on a project, and we ended up with disparate sets of data. The database schemas were the same, but I had inserted some data that he needed. I could have just sent him a SQL backup file, but he had data in his database that I did not have. So the only solution was to create INSERT statements for all the data that I had inserted, and for him to do the same. Obviously, this is a tremendous waste of time. So we came up with "CF_GenInserts" [More]

Begining Flex with Flash Remoting - Part 1

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:26:00-0400

A friend of mine was telling me about the problem he was having getting Flex to communicate with CF. While it is not difficult in and of its self, the problem is that there are several ways to do it and doing some combination of them will not work. Coming from a Flash background, I am most comfortable/familiar with the Remoting method, so that is what I will demonstrate.
[More]

Strange FuseBox Bug

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:18:00-0400

I encountered a strange problem at work the other day. I started getting all kinds of strange fusebox errors, mostly saying that fuses were undefined, that did exist, and the default was looking for a fuse that did not exist! Pretty much drove me insane. The application has 2 "parts" the main site and the admin. In the main site, I am tracking the number of active sessions and a couple other vars. I wanted to be able to check the values of those variables from the admin, so in the Application.cfc of the admin, I specified the same name as the main site. I.e.


/*Main Site Application.cfc*/
this.name="MainSite";


/*Admin Application.cfc*/
this.name="MainSite";

I had done this numerous times, in various locations with no problem. Somehow (don't ask me how) I realized that all of fusebox is loaded in the application scope and the bug was occured if the app.cfc that was loaded into memory was the admin app.cfc, then you went to the front of the site (mainSite) it would break, because it was using the fusebox vars from the admin, and thus looking for fuses that don't exist, and not finding fuses that do exist. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure on what exacly was going on, however, I do know that once I name the applications unique names, I have not had the problem since. I now store the vars in the server scope, so that I can hit them from any application.

I create a struct in the Server scope for each site on the server, with active sessions etc.

Has anyone else encountered a problem like this?

Draw your database in any language

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:13:00-0400

A friend of mine at work sent me this link; it's pretty cool. Basically, you create your tables, columns, defaults, and relationships in designer mode, and once you are done, you tell it what language to generate the script in. You can also import your database from an XML file, and modify it, simlar to what you used to be able to do in the old(er) version of Visio.

http://ondras.zarovi.cz/sql/demo/

My First Post

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 16:41:00-0400

I've spent the past few hours thinking about what my first blog entry should be. Turns out that it was a lot easier to think of blog topics when I didn't have a blog. Anyway, after thinking about it, I decided to start off small and mention a really cool site that I found a few weeks ago. I am currently working on a freelance project with a designer. We needed to have some sort of project tracking software and an SVN server. Enter Assembla. I must have spent a good 2 or 3 hours looking for a free SVN server before I came across Assembla. It has all sorts of cool tools and utilities, and most importantly, it is free. I have been using it now for about 2-3 weeks and have had no problems. I highly recommend it.

http://www.assembla.com/