While working with CFLDAP recently I needed to develop filters that would authenticate active directory members who belonged to certain characteristic groups and whose domain accounts were not disabled. There are a number of online resources that can help with filtering domain lookups but when you combine the filters together the conditional logic can be problematic. I ended up wasting a lot of time configuring and reconfiguring my filter.

If you're working within an active directory and you need to filter users based on certain criteria, then one of the best tools that you can use is called Active Directory Explorer from Sysinternals. You can use this tool to find the exact search parameters you require from your CFLDAP filter and then just copy and paste them into the attribute. This will prevent you from wasting time trying to design all the parameters needed in the conditional logic of the filter. The search feature in the Active Directory Explorer tool allows you to define any kind of search parameters you may need and takes care of things like "contains", "is equal to", and "does not contain".

The conditional logic of the Active Directory Explorer tool works a lot like CFSCRIPT and can be a little daunting at first. As soon as you start combining conditional elements together you could end up spending a lot of time adapting your filter. Using the GUI search interface in Active Directory Explorer will allow you to develop your filter requirements quickly and effectively.

Information on the Active Diretory Explorer tool can be found here.

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I was recently working on a ColdFusion 9 project using CFTREE and CFLAYOUT together. The project called for user selection of the tree icons that would cause navigation panels in the layout to display different directory contents and provide the appropriate edit menus.

Everything was working as planned, after applying some new logic and adding the decorative icons and balanced color schemes. While alpha testing I noticed that the tree would occasionally fail to trigger the layout panel and you would be left with partial content and rouge JavaScript errors. This was battled for about a week. Line by line the code was checked for flaws, the data was checked, the database was checked, and then begrudgingly the ColdFusion built-in Ajax was examined. The error message was simply that the layout panel was undefined.

When all lines of code involved were completely examined and nothing obvious could be found, we turned our attention to reproducing the actual error. It seemed as though it could happen to any content from any position in the tree. The real kicker was that it could only be triggered if the user would rapidly click on the tree nodes. The first fix-candidate was a two second timeout applied to the tree whenever a node was clicked, but this slowed the application down and was generally irritating. Utilizing the windows "onerror" event was eventually settled on as a fix. When triggered, thanks to rapidly clicking on a tree node, the event listener simply reloaded the layout area and flushed the client error notice.

The bottom line though, is that when combined with the CFLAYOUT, the CFTREE tag in ColdFusion 9 (no other versions have been tested) will generate a client side JavaScript error when the user clicks on any tree node too quickly in rapid succession. If you have these tags combined, users will click, over-click, and rapid click; so you may need to develop your own mechanism to capture and deal with the client side error event.

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I was working with CFMESSAGEBOX and kept getting the client side error that there was an exception thrown and not caught, the culprit was identified as the "CFAJAX.JS" file on line 90.

There really isn't anything wrong this the JS file, the problem is that when you call CFMESSAGEBOX from an ajax page, there is little you have to do, but when you are calling it from a page without any other ajax and you receive the error; just be sure to use the "AjaxOnload" command to execute at the bottom of your page.

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Did you know that you can add HTML items to the title of a CFLAYOUTAREA?ﾠ This works out really well if you would like to include an icon or special button that is completely independent of the content being displaying inside the layout.

<cfset IconFolder="<img src="&Chr(34)&"/Info.png"&Chr(34)&" width=20 height=20 />">

<cflayout type="border" name="PanelParent" align="left" fittowindow="yes">
   <cflayoutarea position="left" title="#IconFolder# INSTRUCTIONS" size="250">
      Stuff
   </cflayoutarea>
</cflayout>

The code above will place an icon in the title just before the word "instructions". Hope you can find a good use for this one! Enjoy!

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Here is a User Defined Function I created that will take a numeric file size value and convert it to abbreviated file size text. The function will append "bytes" if the number is less than 1000. It will strip of the last three numbers if the file size is between 1000 and 999999 and append " kb" to the number. Lastly, it will strip off the last six numbers if the file size is greater than or equal to 1000000 and append " mb" to the number. If you need it to also show gigabyte notation, the last conditional will need to be changed and fourth added to handle the larger file size.

<cffunction name="fnFileSize" access="public" returntype="string">
   <cfargument name="FileSize" type="numeric" required="yes">
   <cfscript>
      //CONVERTS NUMBER INTO FILESIZE WORDS
      ConvertSize=0;
      if (FileSize LT 1000) {
         ConvertSize=FileSize & " bytes";}
      if (FileSize GTE 1000 AND FileSize LTE 999999) {
         ConvertSize=Left(FileSize, Len(FileSize)-3) & " kb";}
      if (FileSize GTE 1000000) {
         ConvertSize=Left(FileSize, Len(FileSize)-6) & " mb";}
      return ConvertSize;
   </cfscript>
</cffunction>

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