QuackFuzed.com is the personal ColdFusion coding blog of Matt Quackenbush. It exists primarily as a place for the author to learn, and hopefully to assist others in learning and/or avoiding some of the same pitfalls and mistakes. (Quack certainly makes enough mistakes daily to make up for the entire ColdFusion community.)
jQuery's star rating plugin makes it simple to add a "Rate Me" interface to your application. Combine it with cfUniForm v4.0, and now it's ridiculously simple to add a star rating field (or ten) to any form.
One of the improvements in the latest cfUniForm release is a change in behavior for the 'pluginSetup' attribute on the field tag. Even though this change does not break any old code, I still wanted to write a brief explanation of what the change is, why I made it, and how to make use of it.
WOW! It has been a year already since cfUniForm v3.0 was released. I guess it's about time I made some serious upgrades, eh? Well, after a year of a few minor updates, I present to you cfUniForm v4.0, a major release with a number of new features and other updates to make it leaner and meaner.
As noted in the cfUniForm documentation, Bob Silverberg's ValidateThis validation framework plays quite nicely with cfUniForm. However, there is one "gotcha" that I have been meaning to blog about for awhile now, but keep forgetting.
I have just released cfUniForm v3.5, which can be downloaded from the riaforge project page. This latest version includes a couple of minor bug fixes as well as a new 'enctype' attribute for your form tag, which allows you to create your own upload fields without relying on the built-in type="file" field.
Be sure to check out the new multiple uploads demo as well as the updated FAQs page.
A big "thank you!" goes to Byron Raines for providing the use case for the multiple uploads (one I had not thought of) as well as submitting a couple of patches for bugs (related to providing an ID for individual fields).
Anyone that knows me knows that I hate doing UI work. Why? Because I suck at it. Graphics, design, and layout are definitely not among my talents. Which is why I love jQuery so much. I can write a little bit of JavaScript - very little, in fact - add a plugin or two, and voila! I have a nice looking user interface for my application.
After using a few very handy form-related jQuery plugins and integrating them into my cfUniForm library, I decided it was time I go ahead and release a plugin of my own.
In my previous entry I discussed the use of comment-based attributes for the new all-script CFCs in CF9 and what it actually takes to make them work as advertised. As Andy Matthews pointed out in a comment on the post, they aren't technically "comments" in a traditional sense, but rather are JavaDoc notations.
After spending a bit of time weighing the arguments both for and against the use of comments as executable code, and playing with using them and not using them, I have conclusively sided with the "comments as executable code are pure evil" group. Why?
If you're like me, you absolutely love CF9's new script-based CFCs. I recently re-worked a very simple class and went from 111 lines of code in my old tag-based version down to 66 lines of code in the new all-script version. Nice! But I was having trouble getting comment-based attributes for the component, properties, and functions to actually work.
One of the "tricks" I have used for a long time now is to use a mixin with an object. For example, I have a collection of UDFs that are related to date and time manipulation. Certain classes get all or some of these mixed in like so:
One of the (many) really nice features of CF9 is the addition of implicit getters and setters for CFCs. While I love having a concrete API, I am learning to love this idea more and more because of the saved keystrokes.
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