CFCatch me if you can

One thing that really annoys me with the cfcatch struct/object (or whatever its pretending to be) is trying to use one of the keys and have it not exist. There have been a few times where I simply want to log cfcatch.detail and it's undefined, throwing a hard error. To me, if it's documented that it is going to be available, it should at least be available as an empty string. I set out this morning looking for a clean way of param'ing some of the keys in cfcatch. Since it doesn't seem to be a true struct, you can't simply do:

<cfparam name="cfcatch.detail" default="" />

That would be way too easy. I found a couple places that suggested using duplicate() to make it act like a struct. I tried that too, and you still can't do a cfparam on it. The key simply won't exist.

After much googling, I came across this post by Isaac Dealey. So using that idea, I created the following function:

<cffunction name="structifyCatch" returntype="struct">
   <cfargument name="catch" type="any" required="true"/>

   <cfset var err = structnew() /> 
   <cfset structappend(err,arguments.catch,true) />

   <cfreturn err />

  </cffunction>

then to implement it, you call the following:

<cftry>
   ... some code ...
   <cfcatch>
     <cfset cfcatch = structifyCatch(cfcatch) />
     <cfparam name="cfcatch.message" default=""/>
     <cfparam name="cfcatch.detail" default=""/>
     <cflog text="There was an error in somecode().
        Message: #cfcatch.message# Detail: #cfcatch.Detail#"
       application="yes">
   </cfcatch>
 </cftry>

Hopefully this will save you a little bit of angst.
There are some interesting behaviors documented here too:
cfcatch was born a struct, then it wasn’t but now it’s back

Blessings,
Terry

Coldspring stopped me cold..

We just recently upgraded to Coldspring 1.2 and it wasn't long before I came to a grinding halt the next time that I needed to restart my CF instance. I got the following error:

Object Instantiation Exception
An exception occurred when instantiating a Java object.
The class must not be an interface or an abstract class. Error: ''.

The error occurred in C:\websites\coldspring\beans\AbstractBeanFactory.cfc: line 253

Our beta system wasn't having the same issues, so I decided to look at what might be different in the two environments. I found that I was still on 8.0.0 (doh!). So I went to http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb403277&sliceId=1 and upgraded.

That worked right? Wrong! Though it was good for me to get up to speed with the proper version, it did nothing in getting me back to productivity. I browsed some more on some blogs with pieces of the error message and came across a blog that seemed to think this error happend when some nulls were being thrown around when it expected actual values. I looked at this line in the loadFrameworkProperties method in Coldspring/beans/AbstractBeanFactory.cfc:

<cfset local.fileStream = CreateObject('java', 'java.io.FileInputStream').init(arguments.propertiesFile) />

... which caused me to look in the initial code or the AbstractBeanFactory.cfc file here:

<!--- ColdSpring Framework Properties --->
<cfset variables.instanceData.frameworkPropertiesFile
       = "/coldspring/frameworkProperties.properties" />
<cfset variables.instanceData.frameworkProperties
       = loadFrameworkProperties(ExpandPath(variables.instanceData.frameworkPropertiesFile)) />

So I looked for the .properties file in the /coldspring directory and found nodda. I plugged an empty file into the coldspring directory by the name of frameworkProperties.properties and I was back in business.

Hope this helps.

Blessings...