Bruce Van Horn

Before you read this article look at your calendar. That's right: it's December already! Where did 2001 go so fast? The first year of the new millennium was definitely not one of those "ho-hum-nothing-much-happened" years. It was a busy, exciting, turbulent, and tragic year for most of us. Here's hoping that 2002 will be just as busy and exciting but without so much turbulence and tragedy. Happy holidays to you and your loved ones! Partial Retraction I don't have any questions to address this month, but I'd like to offer a slight retraction (actually, just a word of caution) of last month's article in which I talked about sparing yourself some of the hassles of locking every reference to shared variables (those in the Server, Application, or Session scopes) by copying them into and out of the Request scope. This subject is covered in the Advanced ColdFusion class and... (more)

Ask the Training Staff

Well, the new millennium is finally here (sorry for those of you who thought it started last year) and with it comes many unanswered and some unanswerable questions. Fortunately for you CF developers out there, your CF questions don't have to fall into the category of unanswerable.... Send them in, and we'll get them answered for you. Here are some recent questions to kick off the new year: Q:I need to do a three-layer grouping in a report to properly display my information. In MS Access this is no problem; you just use the grouping in the report and work your way through as many... (more)

Ask the Training Staff

Sometimes I take for granted just how cool ColdFusion really is! The other day one of my programmers asked me how to do what I thought was a fairly easy task. When I showed him the four lines of CF code he needed, he said, "ColdFusion rocks! It would have taken me 50 lines in PHP to do the same thing!" What could I say, other than "Yep"? Below are a few lines of code that I hope will make your life easier. Q:How can we prevent a browser from caching the content of our Web pages? For example, our content is constantly changing; if a user browses a page, goes on to other pages, a... (more)

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Two questions I received this month made me realize just how often we overlook the power of Lists and the many List functions in CF. Many times, we look at a string or other piece of data and don't even realize that what we're looking at is actually a list. Once we realize that something can be treated as a list, CF gives us many ways of using or manipulating that data. Here are two perfect examples: Q: We have an e-mail news-letter that we send out to those who subscribed at our Web site. All they have to do is give us their e-mail address. I want to find out how many unique dom... (more)

Ask the Training Staff

This month we have three questions to consider. I like them all because they're very practical and applicable to many kinds of applications. I particularly like the third question about encryption methods because it gives me an opportunity to cover two undocumented ColdFusion functions. I hope you find my answers helpful. Keep those questions coming! Q: My question has to do with forcing session variables to time out after a specified period of time - not a period of inactivity. I am writing an online testing application that should allow a user only 10 minutes to take a test. Ho... (more)