Category: ColdFusion

Adventures in bad variable names

There are many built-in, always-there variable scopes in CF, including #cgi#, #form#, #url#, etc., and one does well to avoid using these names for anything other than their intended purpose.  However, I was doing a CFHTTP call (in CF8) and set the result attribute to 'http' (the result attribute allows you to specify the return variable name rather than receive the 'cfhttp' default) and immediately had issues. 

I discovered, to my surprise, that 'http' is synonymous with 'cgi' - at least under CF8/IIS6.  I actually would have expected it to be synonymous with 'cfhttp' (I seem to recall that 'http' was the fixed return variable name from cfhttp calls in earlier versions of CF?).

Anyway, if I ever need cgi environment variable values I use, of course, #cgi#.  I don't ever recall using #http# and never suspected it existed.  Begs the question why synonymous scope names even exist.

Anyway, weird.

DBX 10.1.8 Released

Minor  update in this version:

• when launching the SQL*Exec window from the table or view detail page, the populated sql now has the columns [bracketed] (by request)
• increased the default size of the textarea in the SQLExec window since although its actually sizable by way of resizing the frames, the frames are difficult to see/resize

Also, it seems that RIAForge still suffers from its frequent downtime, so I've added a new alternate download link for DBX on the Projects page.

DBX 10.1.7 Released

Changes in this version:

- added explicit identification of SQL2008 (would previously fail with 'unsupported version')
- fixed stylesheet references when printing tabs

While I don't have an available SQL2008 instance to test against, to the best of my knowledge all of the SQL2005-specific routines in DBX should work fine in SQL2008.  If anyone experiences issues with SQL2008, file a bug report at riaforge and I may just have to suck it up and create an instance somewhere (I'm reticent to create a SQL2008 instance on one of my dev boxes as we are homogeneously SQL2005, and its probable there would be some kind of an impact on the integrity of an already installed instance of 2005 - guessing).