One issue I came across recently was creating modal popup’s in ColdFusion, so that a user could click on a button, fill out a form, then when they submitted the appropriate part of the form was reloaded, and they never had to navigate away. The example that I am going to use is a standard select box with a list in it and a button that opens the window to modify the contents of that list.

To do this we will be using a cfwindow. For this example I’ll assume you already have the page that you would like to display in the window, and have some basic CFML and Javascript knowledge.

function createWindow() {
  var config = new Object();
  config.modal=true;
  config.center=true;
  config.height=500;
  config.width=700;
  config.resizable=false;
  config.closable=false;
  config.draggable=true;
  config.refreshonshow=true;
  try{
    ColdFusion.Window.getWindowObject('myWindow');
    ColdFusion.navigate('/windowContent.cfm', 'myWindow');
    ColdFusion.Window.show('myWindow');
  } catch(e) {
    ColdFusion.Window.create('myWindow','', '/windowContent.cfm', config);
    document.getElementById(ColdFusion.Window.getWindowObject("myWindow").header.id).className = "windowHdr";
  }
  ColdFusion.Window.getWindowObject('resetPasswordWindow').center();
}

So lets explain what we are doing here. The first part of this is creating a new struct called config, where we hold the configuration for the window. There are many configuration options avaiable, and most of them have defaults, yet for mine I wanted to go a little more custom than the default. Most of the options are fairly straight forward, so if you need a little more of an explanation, check out the cfdocs.org page for cfwindow.

There are a couple of known bugs with CFML 9 involving CFML, the first one of which is that the function used to destroy a window (and free up the resources associated with it) does not currently work.

ColdFusion.Window.destory('myWindow', true);

That is what the try/catch block is for. First, it attempts to get the window (in case it has been previously created and hidden). If it is successful, it uses a ColdFusion.navigate to redirect the window to the correct page, then shows the window. If it fails to get the window, it assumes that the window does not exist, and will create a new window.

The second line in the catch is used set the CSS class name of the window. This should be able to be set in the config struct, however it did not appear to work for me.

The last workaround is the bottom line of the code. When upgrading from CF8 to CF9 the windows stopped appearing in the center of the screen (not only was this set in the config, it is also supposed to be the default). So, we grab the window, and tell it it center once it has been created.

One last little trick is what to do when the window is closed. The site I am currently working on uses these cfwindows to modify the contents of the main page, so once the window has been closed, we need to reload the page. As it turns out, there is an event associated with closing the window so it is very simple to do this. All you have to do is insert this code after the last line in the code above.

ColdFusion.Window.onHide('myWindow', reloadPage);

And then in the reloadPage function:

function reloadPage(){
  location.reload(true);
}

I did attempt to this by directly inserting the location.reload(true) into the onHide call, but this didnt work.

I have some other stuff lined up that I am going to post, but it took over a month to get this post together, so it might be a little while.

The main reason for this change is that the position is much closer to what I enjoy about working with computers. The work is varied and challenging, and I feel the decision was a very good one. I have already worked on a couple of interesting projects, with the main one being theCloud, a hosted services platform that we will be releasing in May. I hope to post a few things about stuff that I am working on or things that I have learnt (without revealing any work secrets of course) but I will leave those for another day.

This also means that I will be moving back to Hamilton sometime in the next few weeks, so hopefully I have a chance to keep updating through the move, but things dont always go to plan.

Everything went smooth until I rebooted the system, and after a while when I tried to get back into it I noticed it hadnt come back online. I plugged a monitor a keyboard into the system and rebooted it to see what the issue was and I saw this screen.

mountall: /proc: unable to mount: Device or resource busy
mountall: /proc/self/mountinfo: Not such file or directory
mountall: root filesystem isn’t mounted
init: mountall main process (2025) terminated with status 1
General error mounting filesystems.
A maintenance shell will now be started.

So I hit the internet and tried to figure out wehat was going on, and found out this appears to be a problem for a lot of people, but none of the solutions I found worked for me, mostly because my fileserver has no cd drive and booting from a flash drive doesnt seem to work either.

From what I can gather the main reason this issue is happening is becase Grub is broken during the update process and is pointing at the wrong drive/kernel. Most solutions involved booting into a live cd and fixing menu.lst from there or using grub-update. Eventually I managed to fix the problem by going into grub and manually editing the boot command to point at the correct drive and the correct kernel. The easiest way to do this for your system is to use tab completion as it will tell you all the options and using a little trial and error you can get it going.

Hopefully this saves someone else from hours of torture.

One thing I have been following very closely for a long time now is Android. For those of you who don’t know what Android is, it is an operating system made by Google, aimed at smart phones, but also moving into lots of other devices as well.

I have now signed up to be a contributor to a new site, www.newzealandroid.co.nz. I’m aiming to try and shed some insight from what I’ve found about Android (hopefully have more insight when I can actually BUY an Android handset). If you want, check it out. The site isnt open yet, and I’ll post again once it is.

Since then we have had quite a lot going on at work, and are only just starting to focus on the migration again, so here’s where we are up to at this stage.

Firstly. we are going to move the database from MS SQL Server 2000 to PostgreSQL. This in itself will be a massive task as there is no easy way to move the hundreds of stored procedures over (or so I’m told, I havent looked into it much yet). Once this is done we will be running the code as is against the new database and hoping that it works. I’ll let you know once that is done and where we are going from there.

On a side note, this blog along with a couple of others hosted on this server will be moved to a new server before the 30th of September. As long as everything goes smooth there should be minimal downtime for the site, and I should be able to keep all the info currently on here. I’m going to be backing everything up just in case though.

#!/bin/bash

FILE=”/tmp/$(basename $0).$RANDOM.$$.txt”;

echo Searching for access to files with $1;

sudo cat /var/log/apache2/access.log | grep -i *PUT YOUR NAME HERE* | grep $1 > $FILE;

if [ -z "$2" ]
then
echo “no exclusions”;
else
echo “excluding files containing $2″;
cat $FILE | grep -v $2 > $FILE;
fi

cat $FILE | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 1 | sort | uniq -c > $FILE;

for i in $(cat $FILE)
do
echo -ne “$i    -       “; whois $i -H | egrep ‘OrgName|descr’ | head -n 1 | cut -d ‘:’ -f 2;
done

To use it, just copy the script (replacing the part that says *PUT YOUR NAME HERE* with your username) into a file, set it as an executable using  chmod +x, then run it. The first argument is the string you are looking for access to, e.g. pdf will show all pdf’s, and there is a second optional string for if you want to exclude files with names containg a certain string.

For starters we are looking at porting our code to C#, rather than VB.Net in Mono, and removing the ASP stuff from it etc. We are also looking at implementing localisation of the site. Originally when looking at this in Visual Studio we would have to look at purchasing a tool to pull out all the translatable strings in the program. Luckily, I found out mono-develop does this for free. Awesomeness.

At this stage the idea is that we are going to go for a proof of concept and move the code over to Mono as it is in it’s VB.Net/ASP form, then we will look at doing the actual port, as time is a little critical for us.

The first step is to setup a virtual machine for running Ubuntu (our OS of choice for the cloud) and install Mono/PostgreSQL etc on it. I choose to use VirtualBox for 2 reasons, 1) I hadnt used it before and it looked very interesting and 2) VMWare was causing my machine to go into an infinite “Cannot load Drivers” loop on the windows host, so it wasnt really an option at all.

Once I had completed this I downloaded and ran MoMA. This tool will scan the assemblies for your program and tell you what problems there are with running the code on Mono. We have a few problems on ours, but most of it is SQL calls that aren’t implemented, so I’ll find a way around this.

At the end of the MoMA tool there are links to a few sites that have definately helped me in moving the code over for the first test. Now there is just one last step before attempting to build the code in Mono and see how badly it breaks.

Clean the code. It is pointless trying to port everything over unless you need everything. I have currently removed about 50k of code from the site that is either no longer used and, thanks to my predescessor, has never been removed. I also found thousands of table entries and a good 30+ tables and another few hundred stored procedures that are either not used or obsolete. I’m still in the process of cleaning up before I try the build, but once that is done I shall let you know how things go.

At the same time as we do this, we are wanting to make the move to using OSS. This is going to be quite a move, with our development enivronment being firmly embedded in MS technologies at the moment. So we have a few steps that we are going to be going through. I am hoping over the next few months to share my experiences in moving our product from the MS environment to running on Ubuntu server using Mono (the C# variety) and Postgresql. It will be interesting, with the need for a demonstration of the new product by mid-August.

Also, on a side note, I have moved out of where I was staying temporarily into a new place, and once I have sorted out my internet issues I shall be looking at finally getting around to working on MPLS again.