ColdFusion Muse

Adding an image to a CFGRID

Silly me, I assumeed you couldn't insert images into a flash CFGRID. I stumbed across this example on an excellent blog by As Fusion (laura Arguello and Nahuel Foronda). Apparently you can insert thumbnails right into the grid using an HTML element. That's a new one on me. The trick is to bind a column in the grid to a CfFormItem. As always, someone will always find a way.

Getting a reference to a flash form in Javascript

It's trying not to have adequate access to the client side movie produced by a flash form. For example, I Have a large number of panels in an accordian pane and I want to hide or unhide them based on user preferences. I also want to resize the form movie as the panels are "hidden" to make better use of the visible area of the screen. I wanted to be able to change the "height" and "width" parameters of the movie.

The problem is, that while the "NOSCRIPT" block has an ID parameter to it, the "document.write" block that outputs the object tag does not have and ID parameter attached to it (in spite of my putting ID="blah" in the CFFORM tag). That seems like a bug. Anyway, I went about trying to find another way to access the properties of the embeded movie. I came up with the following:

Flash Form Debugging

While I'm enjoying the power and especially the "look and feel" of the new flash forms interface I'm are a little frustrated with the lack of good debugging information. It would be nice if additional information could be ported into the Coldfusion debugging info at the bottom - or a perhaps a log file could be written. It's very hard to know what's going on. When a flash form is long it takes a while to compile anyway. Because I don't know how long it should take I end up sitting on my hands waiting for the little "initializing" to appear. If it doesn't I assume something has gone wrong internally and start looking at the code. That's not exactly slam dunk debugging.

Flash Forms and the local shared object

Coldfusion MX version 7 gives us a great new feature when using <CFFORM>. It renders the forms in a flash form. The look is clean and the result is well behaved and intuitive. We've had a lot of fun creating prototypes using flash form grids and the accordian pane or tabbed interface. It's great to be able to create a form with tabs that doesn't require round trips to the server and has solid validation routines. Along the way we hit a couple of challenges and came up with a few solutions ....