Are you a ColdFusion developer? Have you ever wanted to get away from using CGI variables such as CGI.SCRIPT_NAME but didn't quite know what else to use? Then you might find the following list of CGI variables and their respective ColdFusion/Java Servlet Alternative methods to be helpful because I couldn't find much (if any) documentation on this:

Here's some code you can use to copy and paste to your .cfm file for testing:

Obviously, you should test these on your server before using them in production. Some of the methods may or may not be available. For example, I get empty strings using getPathInfo() and getPathTranslated(). You might want to try something like the following to see what methods are available on your server:

Here's some more interesting information. Let's say you've defined some variables in a 'globalvariables.cfm' file and included them in your Application.cfc template, such as:

If you run the following code, you should see what you also expected to see by simply using <cfoutput>#REQUEST.RootDirectory#</cfoutput> or <cfoutput>#REQUEST.CurrentDirectory#</cfoutput>.

Just for fun, try this too:

For more information on the Java HttpServletRequest: http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/2.2/javadoc/javax/servlet/http/HttpServletRequest.html

For more informaiton on HTTP Header Field Definitions, see: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html

If you catch a typo or have some other insight, please feel free to add to this.

Recently, I needed to dynamically divide content up between two and three columns, (clients can be picky, can't they?), and thought I would share what I came up with. I'm sure there are/have been others who have done this sort of thing before, but sometimes it's just more fun to do it yourself. If you've done this in a simpler method, please feel free to share.

The main idea here is to pull a news article from a database, and use ColdFusion to then divide up the article in a way that could be displayed over a 2- or 3-column layout. I'll just try to explain my thought process here and show how I executed my plan.

Most news articles (or 'content' in general) are merely lists of words (and sometimes other elements, such as html markup) separated by a space. So if I could calculate the number of list items, I could simply perform a few more calculations to determine starting and ending points in outputting the 'list' or content. For example, if I wanted a 2-column layout, first I would want to determine the length of the list by using something like LISTLEN(). So let's start there:

So as you can see, I'm holding the total list length in a variable called myListCount. Now, by dividing the total length (myListCount) by two (2), I could find the 'half-way' point in the list. But wait, what happens if the 'half-way' point becomes a fraction? Easy enough, I would just use ROUND() to clean that up. Cool?

Now, all I have to do is determine the 'starting point' for the remaining half of the list. Since we have determined the halfway point and are holding the number in a variable called halfCount, would could simply add one (1) to the halfway point. Doing so will tell us exactly where to begin our second (or last) half.

Let's take an inventory of what we have to work with so far. We know the beginning of the list (which is always 1, most of the time), we have the ending point (myListCount), the halfway point (halfCount) and the starting point of the second half (lastHalf). The last thing we have to do is whip up some CFLOOP statements using these variables and determine where we want to output the data. For simplicity, I'll create and use a 2-column table, placing the first half in the left column and the last half in the right column.

This code should produce something similar to:

And that's pretty much it. Using similar thought processes, here's an example of using ColdFusion to spread content over a 3-column table:

This code should produce something similar to:

Hope this helps!

The other day I read one of Ben Nadel's "Ask Ben" posts where a reader asked about calculating the difference between two dates and wanted to know how to display the estimated time left to buy ... much like ebay. Ben did a great job of giving a brief explanation on calculating the difference between two dates and kind of left it at that.

This sounded interesting to me and I couldn't resist the challenge to create a ColdFusion custom tag to handle the calculations and even display (to a limited degree of course). So here's what I came up with:

There's several calculations going on in there, but ultimately the custom tag can accept two parameters, dateStart and dateEnd. They both default to the current date and time, so if you don't pass anything to it, the countdown would simply reply with "Bidding has ended for this item." The idea though would be to just pass in the ending date (dateEnd) and as long as the ending date is in the future, then a countdown is displayed and formatted quite similar to the one found on ebay.

Assuming you've dropped the code above into a template and placed it into your custom tags folder and named it "auctiontimer.cfm", you could add the following to a page and see the results:

Would display "Time Left: 7w 2d 12h 39m 45s" - (assuming the page was executed at approximately 1:50 PM on 08/15/2008 that is).

Just for giggles, I created a little more sophisticated example using a query for newbie's trying to figure this stuff out:

This would display something like:

So there you have it, an ebay-esque auction countdown timer. There are obviously several other ways to accomplish this but I wanted to have a little fun. Enjoy!