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Ben Forta mentioned a couple of days a go a new tag introduced with Scorpio, called CFPRINT.  If you don’t run Intranet applications this tag might not be of your interest, however if you do, you might need to perform tasks such as printing nightly sales reports, monthly inventory reports or just print customer’s orders as they come in.  CFPRINT automates this process for you, so that now human intervention is needed or hacks.

The ColdFusion service must be running under a user with rights to print through the Network or Local computer depending on your setup.  Remember this will work as long as you have your printer available to your Local Network where the CF Server resides.  This means that if you have multiple locations for your business and have a remote printer available to your local network you should be able to print then to that remote location.  This is great if you receive all your orders in a central location but then redistribute those depending on the proximity of the customer or just depending on inventory availability, etc.

You can see a list of all available printers through the ColdFusion Administrator.  Ben also mentioned in his post a new function that came along with the CFPRINT tag, called GetPrinterInfo().  As the name suggests this will return information pertinent to the requested printer.

You can read Ben’s Post here

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So far ColdFusion does not have a default driver to connect to a PostgreSQL Database. However you can manually create a connection using a JDBC driver.

1. Download the JDBC driver http://jdbc.postgresql.org/ You need to know what is your JDK version so that you can select the proper driver. To check your JDK version open Terminal and type:
   java --version
   In my case I have "1.4.2", therefore I downloaded JDBC 3 for PostgreSQL 8.1
2. Copy the driver (jar file) to your coldfusion location at:
   [cfRootFolder]/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/cfusion-war/WEB-INF/cfusion/lib
   in my case this was:
   /opt/jrun4/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/cfusion-war/WEB-INF/cfusion/lib
3. Restart ColdFusion:
   cd into /opt/jrun4/bin/ and type:
./jrun -restart


NOTE: for some reason when

I execute this command it my system won't complete the restart process so I had to do a Stop and Start like ./jrun -stop and then ./jrun -start

4. Now go to your ColdFusion admin add a new Data Source of type "Other"
5. Enter your JDBC URL as: jdbc:postgresql://localhost/[your database name]
6. Set Driver Class and Driver Name as: org.postgresql.Driver
7. Enter the user name and password.

   Note: You can use your "postgres" user account. I have instead created a specific account for coldfusion, you can create users through pgAdmin.

8. Submit. You should get an "ok" in the status.

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This is a good article on Form validation in ColdFusion with an Object-Oriented approach.  Form validation is one of those tedious tasks that we, the web developers, have to deal with every day.  This article explains how to deal with basic data validation and business rules validation, how to keep these two separated so that we can move our data validation between applications and avoid the rewriting of this one over and over.

Check it out:

Object-Oriented Form Validation in ColdFusion — For Web developers, form validation is a basic task, and yet one that presents some interesting challenges. Even discounting security issues such as SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting (XSS), form validation is a critical step in your error handling strategy.

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It works great, but as usual you have make a few modifications before getting it to work properly. 

1. Unzip your cfcUnit file.
2. Place the inside folder content (cfcunit and org) in your webroot
3. Modify the file cfcunit/index.cfm and change
   <code><cfinclude template="machII/mach-ii.cfm"/></code> to:
   <code><cfinclude template="machii/mach-ii.cfm"/></code>
4. Create a mapping to your org folder in coldfusion.
5. That's it, now run the test as explained in their documentation and it should work!

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The ColdFusion webserver configuration utility, known as wsconfig, may encounter the error ‘Exception occured trying to get an MBean.’ The wsconfig utility can be run in either graphical mode or console mode. In either mode, if the wsconfig utility is executed with the Sun JVM version 1.5, then this error will occur. Macromedia has not tested Sun JVM 1.5 with ColdFusion MX for use in running the ColdFusion server or for running the wsconfig utility. It appears that the Sun JVM 1.5 is more strict about getter/setter method invocation.

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