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In the past we've talked about implicit views in ColdBox which mean that if the action in your event handler doesn't call setView() explicitly, ColdBox will use conventions to try and find the view to render.  Well, ColdBox also supports something called Implicit View Dispatch which goes one step further and allows you to dispatch a view to the user without running any event at all.

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Hopefully you are already familiar with the format of a default ColdBox URL when using the SES interceptor.  

 

mysite.com/index.cfm/myHandlerName/myActionName

 

Of course, a simple rewrite rule can simplify that even further to:

 

mysite.com/myHandlerName/myActionName

 <...

In a ColdBox request, form, URL, and remote (proxy request) variables are merged together into the request collection which is accessible via event.getCollection() or as the "rc" struct passed into every action in your handlers.  Data needed to process that request can be added and retrieved from this collection at any time during the request as it is available to any layouts and views as well.  

 

What you may not now howeve...

Have you ever had an ad-hoc helper UDF that you needed in your view?  Perhaps it was too localized to put in your global UDF Library, but you didn't want to clutter up your actual view with the logic.   That's what View Helpers are here for.  

 

They're incredibly simple and driven by good-old conventions.  If you have a view file called products.cfm, simply create a file in the same folder called productsHelper.cfm...

One of the first things you learn with ColdBox is how to add ?fwreinit=1 to the end of your URL to force a reload of the entire application.  This is required to pick up new settings, etc.  Many of you probably leave the reinit password at its default of "1".  While that's fine for your development and testing servers, it's not recommended  on production.  Reinitializing your application can potentially be an intensive operation, and you don't w...

One of the most common server configurations is to have a production server and then 1 or more development or testing servers.  The trick with your "lower" environments is you typically want different settings for logging, error messages, data sources, or outgoing E-mails.  Manually switching settings when you move code is sketchy at best and setting up deployment scripts can be more work than you're willing to take on.

 

Enter ColdBox Environ...

Hopefully you've seen and used the ColdBox docs, recipes, and video tutorials before.   What you may not know is there is an API reference that documents every class and method of the entire framework.  This can be very handy if you want to quickly look up all the arguments to the event.buildLink() method, or see what public methods can be called on a LogBox appender.  

 

The API docs are automatically generated based on component metadata (than...

Dynamic Finders are brand new to ColdBox 3.5.3 which will be released shortly.  I usually give tips on released functionality, but we're real excited about our new Grails-inspired functionality and invite you to check it out on our development line to give them a spin.

 

Dynamic Finders basically let you create very readable code with dynamic method names that describe the criteria being used to to load or count ORM entities. &nbs...

In ColdBox, controllers or event handlers as we call them are defined as CFCs.  Part of the power of this is that you can share and extend code in your applications by simply extending one handler with another.  

 

Imagine a reporting framework where a number of reports will all have a criteria page, validation, execution, and export data action with most of the logic, views, layouts, and models the same between every report ...