ColdFusion

Environment: IIS and Coldfusion 8.

How do you direct the user to a specific tab if the data (logically) requires you to?

I was assigning students to a competition event, but if the student pool was empty, the user should be taken directly to the "Add Student" tab. The underlying principle: "When possible, minimize the user's keystrokes/mouseclicks."

Since this was a flash form, I searched the asfusion site, but came away empty. After some frustrating experimentation, I came up with this 2-step solution.. (there may be better ones out there)

• Create a textbox to store the record count ("records")
• Use a regular expression to update the selectedIndex attribute of the CFFORMGROUP for the tabnavigator

<cfformgroup type="tabnavigator" id="tabs" selectedIndex = "{records.text==0?2:0}">

Note: (1) The "type" for the input box ("records") cannot be "hidden". However, if you use CFINPUT, you can change the "visible" attribute to "false" (2) Tab numbering starts at 0. So the second tab will be "1".

Environment: Coldfusion 8, IIS

While working with Coldfusion on an internal project, I found that Flash forms can be your wonderful friend as well as a scary nightmare. The students love it for the ease-of-use part. But the obstacles are sometimes hard to cross without a decent understanding of JavaScript and/or Action Script. One of these is the ability to link from a row/cell in a grid to display a dynamically filtered page. My google searches with the above title as search terms took me to a lot of posts that simply said, "it cannot be done directly". The trick is to use some ActionScript in the onChange Event of CFGRID

There is no doubt that Coldfusion generates useful error dumps. However, after the first few lines, the string of java code that is thrown at you can be very discouraging - especially if you don't know Java. The experience is even more scary for your users.

Starting with Coldfusion 7, we can use the "onError()" function to catch and display errors more elegantly. Just do a google search on "Coldfusion onError()" and you will come up with some very useful hits. Chief among them is Ray camden's post. He shows you how to email the error page automatically to yourself.