Bruce Van Horn

September means summer is over and we all get back to work or back to school. And for those of us who have been out of school for a very long time, I hope you always look for opportunities to learn something new. Send me your questions if you get stuck! Q:I have a CF Scheduler question: How do I schedule the execution of a template to run at 6 a.m. on weekdays (Mon-Fri) only? I know how to schedule it at 6 a.m. every day, but I don't want it to run on Saturday or Sunday. Any suggestions? A:Unfortunately, there's no way to get the CF Scheduler to do this for you (at least none that I'm aware of). There is, however, an easy way to accomplish this. Schedule the template to run at 6 a.m. every day, which you already know how to do, but put a CFIF block in your template to test for the day of the week. If the current day is a Saturday or Sunday, don't execute the code. T... (more)

In Defense of MS Access

I often hear ColdFusion developers and some of my colleagues who do training for Allaire say things like, "Don't just walk away from MS Access_run!" While I think I know much of the rationale for a statement like that, I still feel I have to come to its defense. The Bad News First! Let me start by saying that I agree, to some extent, with the above derogatory comment about Access. Much of the criticism of ColdFusion comes in the form of "CF is too slow." When asked to explain, people will say, "It seems like most of the ColdFusion sites I visit are slow" or some similar remark a... (more)

Ask the Training Staff

Greetings. I hope all of you who attended the DevCon last month enjoyed it, and came away with some great tips and tricks. This month's column is short, but hopefully addresses some problems that you've encountered recently. Keep those questions coming! Q: I have an application that allows users to upload newsletter articles into a database memo field (I'm using MS Access for my database). My problem is this: when I query the articles from the database and output them using CFOUTPUT, some of the really long articles are getting truncated. I've double-checked, and all of the text ... (more)

Ask the Training Staff

I don't know about you, but February is going to be a very busy month for me. Not only is there plenty of CF work to keep me busy, but my wife, my son, and I are eagerly awaiting the birth of baby boy number two! Nevertheless, I have questions to answer and one revision to make on a previous answer. I hope you find it all worthwhile. First let's deal with the revision of my answer back in December (Vol. 4, issue 12) regarding the use of a placeholder in a query. The question was really centered around writing dynamic queries and how to handle the question of what should go immed... (more)

Ask the Training Staff

Can you believe it's December already? 2002 was certainly a year of big changes for many CFers as Macromedia released the new MX products. Many of us scrambled to come up to speed on the new changes in CFMX. However, the fundamentals of CF programming didn't really change. The newcomer to CF still has to learn the basic CF tags, functions, and logic that were in previous versions before tackling the new features. With that in mind, here are two questions that came in recently that address some basics that CFers deal with every day. Q: I'm having trouble with a nested loop. The c... (more)