arcster.com Blog » ColdFusion

Problem with ColdFusion ListQualify function?

arcster — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:48:27 +0000

Update 9/24/10: Solution to this problem found!

Here’s a ColdFusion/Oracle problem that took way longer than I thought it would.

I wanted to exclude a couple names from a result set an pass the names in a single-quote, comma-delimited list:

My Oracle query looked like this:


select
FULL_NAME,
initcap(TITLE) as TITLE,
BUILDING,
ROOM,
PHONE_NUMBER,
PRIMARYEMAIL
from
people
where
userid NOT IN #VARIABLES.excludelist#

My expectation was for the final line to be output like so:

userid NOT IN ('PHIL','DON')

But it didn’t turn out that way. Instead I got

[Macromedia][Oracle JDBC Driver][Oracle]ORA-00907:
missing right parenthesis

and my debug output showed Oracle was processing the following
select FULL_NAME, initcap(TITLE) as TITLE, BUILDING, ROOM, PHONE_NUMBER, PRIMARYEMAIL from people where userid NOT IN (''PHIL'',''DON'')

Wha? Where did the extra single quotes come from?

I tried various alternatives for my listqualify qualifier, including

but nothing worked.

I finally resolved the problem by using a unique employee number so that I didn’t have to worry about quote marks, but next time I may not be so lucky. So where is the problem? ColdFusion? Oracle? Me?

Cool Find and Replace using regexp

arcster — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:21:37 +0000

So I saved an Excel file as a tab-separated text file. Then I wanted to add some html. The first column was all numbers followed by a tab and the second column.

I opened the text file in Dreamweaver and put the following in the “Find” box: \n([0-9]+)\t

That says “Look for a line break followed by a subexpression containing at least one numeric character followed by a tab”

I put the following in the Replace box: \n

That says “Replace it with a line break followed by a div tag followed by the subexpression (i.e, the number) followed by a closing div followed by an opening div for col2 followed by a tab”

Then the check the “Use regular expression” checkbox and hit “Replace All”

Quirky behavior noted: I couldn’t do one-at-a-time replacements. It only worked when I did Replace All. So make sure you have a back up handy.

Shun the Coldfusion Developer’s Journal

arcster — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:24:13 +0000

Every fricking time I go to the Coldfusion Developer’s Journal (coldfusion.sys-con.com), Firefox crashes.

I hate that.

ColdFusion/Outlook email discovery

arcster — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:06:02 +0000

Generating an Outlook meeting invitation from ColdFusion is a challenge. There are snippets of code here and there, but I finally got a working solution.

[Introductory blurb here]

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 11.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20080317T123000Z
DTEND:20080317T133000Z
LOCATION:Your location
TRANSP:OPAQUE
SEQUENCE:0
UID:0
DTSTAMP:20080303T140000Z
DESCRIPTION:Descriptive text here.\n
SUMMARY:Short summary here
PRIORITY:5
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-IMPORTANCE:1
CLASS:PUBLIC
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Note: If you don’t include the cfmailparts, and try to send the whole thing with content-type = text/calendar, you (well at least I did) will get the following error: IOException while sending message; nested exception is: javax.activation.UnsupportedDataTypeException: no object DCH for MIME type text/calendar; method=REQUEST

Another day in the life of a ColdFusion drone

arcster — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:55:18 +0000

This may be of use to the handful of people in the universe who: 1. use ColdFusion; 2. have no direct access to their Coldfusion server; 3. need to manipulate PowerPoint on the server; and 4. aren’t using .NET

OK, the three of you who are still reading may continue.

So I’m trying to do this via COM and ColdFusion’s cfobject tag.

First, I waited a couple months for the people who run the server to get PowerPoint installed on the server. Then I dusted off some old code from CF Comet.

My code looked like this:




presentationsCollection = objPPT.Presentations;

myPresentation = presentationsCollection.Open("D:xxxmaingetppt.ppt", False, False, False);

newpresentation = objPresentation.SaveAS("D:xxxmainnew.ppt",11, True);
// Close a presentation

objPresentation.Close();

// Quit PowerPoint

objPPT.Quit();

Here was my error the first time I ran the script. (Note: path and file names have been altered)
An exception occurred when executing a Com method. The cause of this exception was that: AutomationException: 0x80004005 - PowerPoint could not open the file. in 'Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003'.
Updated April 2009

Thank you Todd for noticing that somehow my posting got completely botched in the copy and paste process. Here is a working example of a ColdFusion file that uses COM to open a powerpoint pre-loaded onto the server, add data, and then save the new file into a location on the server where the user can download it

Also available as a text file

some query to populate chart

PowerPoint Creator

TYPE=”com”

NAME=”objPPT”

CLASS=”PowerPoint.Application”

ACTION=”connect”>

TYPE=”com”

NAME=”objPPT”

CLASS=”PowerPoint.Application”

ACTION=”create”>

kudos to

http://www.cfregex.com/cfcomet/forum/ViewThread.cfm?ThreadID=F09104FE-1802-684D-687BF5A8897E7E1F

—>

//open as readonly

myPresentation = presentationsCollection.Open(VARIABLES.basefilepath, True, False, False);

//The presentation object has a slides collection

if (isDebugMode()) writeOutput(“Creating collection”);

CollSlides = myPresentation.Slides;

//The first param defines the number of slides.

//The second parameter defines the slide layout

//Figured out blank by trial and error

//blank = 12

//blank with title = 11

ObjSlide = CollSlides.Add(1, 11);

// This chunk of code creates a title. I know it’s a lot just to create a title, but Powerpoint has a lot of classes.

slideShape = ObjSlide.Shapes;

newShape = slideShape.Title;

myTextFrame = newShape.TextFrame;

myTextRange = myTextFrame.TextRange;

myTextRange.Text = “This is the Title”;

// This is how to add more text to the slide.

bodyShape = SlideShape.AddTextBox(1, 200, 300, 700, 100);

bodyShapeTextFrame = bodyShape.TextFrame;

bodyShapeTextRange = bodyShapeTextFrame.TextRange;

bodyShapeTextRange.Text = “This is some additional text”;

//add table

//http://skp.mvps.org/ppttable.htm

//AddTable(NumRows, NumColumns, Left, Top, Width, Height)

//Somewhere I read you couldn’t stack your arguments (this.that.theother) more than two deep

//This doesn’t seem to be true.

//Define the most rows that can display on a page

imaxrows = 10;

//How many rows returned by query?

irowct = Query.RecordCount;

//have to account for record count of 0, or we’ll have issues

//note the nify use of integer division and mod

if (irowct GT imaxrows)

inumslides = funcnumslides(irowct, imaxrows);

function funcnumslides(i1, i2){

inumint = i1 \ i2;

inummod = i1 mod i2;

if (inummod GT 0)

return inumint + 1;

else

return inumint;

}

ObjSlide = CollSlides.Add(inumslides, 11);

bodyShape = SlideShape.AddTable(imaxrows,1,30,110,660,320);

oTable = bodyShape.Table;

oCell = oTable.Cell(1,1);

try {

otext = oCell.Shape.TextFrame.TextRange;

rsltText = Query.RecordCount;

otext.Text = rsltText;

}

catch(Any excpt)

{

WriteOutput(“#excpt.Message#”);

}

newpresentation = myPresentation.SaveAS(VARIABLES.newfilepath, 11, True);

// Close a presentation

myPresentation.Close();

//Quit PowerPoint

objPPT.Quit();

Your file is ready for #VARIABLES.newurl#”>download.
On opening you will be asked to allow macros. Click OK.