ColdFire Updated - Supports Variable

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Posted in ColdFusion | Posted on 07-26-2007 | 1,941 views

Today Nathan Mische and I released ColdFire 0.0.802. This update adds basic support for variables. What do I mean by that? ColdFusion's classic debug view lets you turn on various scopes. When you view a page, that entire scope is dumped out. I never cared for that as it typically displayed a lot more information than I needed. While you could get around that by using cftrace, I wanted something a bit better.

ColdFire now supports a Variables tab. You tell ColdFire the variables you want to display and it will then show the values when the page is refreshed. This is the initial release of Variables support and there are a few caveats. First - I only support simple values. It won't be hard to add support for arrays and other complex variables, but I wanted folks to do some quick testing first. Second, you must use full scopes. Don't just type "x", but rather, variables.x. Or url.x. Or form.x. You get the picture. Here is a screen shot:

Also in this fix are updates by Nathan in the XPI to help with memory leaks and other issues as well.

You can download ColdFire at RIAForge: http://coldfire.riaforge.org

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John Farrar said on 07-26-2007 at 10:50 AM #
	This is the biggest thing that I have wanted in debugging from the start! When you guys get this in we will make this a MAJOR meeting point in the next Adobe User Group meeting in our area. KUDOS! It's so cool that I have to ask how long till we can get the complex variable structure in.

Raymond Camden said on 07-26-2007 at 10:59 AM #
	It will be trivial. The plan is to keep it still string based for now. So an array would be: Array: ["1","2","etc"] Struct: [name="1",age="29"] We _can_ get a bit fancy in our display it a bit closer to cfdump style. We shall see. Right now I just need folks (like you) to tell me if simple stuff is even working.

Adam Tuttle said on 07-26-2007 at 12:12 PM #

While that's certainly a nice feature, I don't see myself using it much because I've become accustomed to just having most of the scopes (usually application, session, request, cgi) added to the debug output, and generally I keep this code in my OnRequestEnd.cfm:

<cfdump var="#variables#" label="Variables scope" expand="false">

You know developers... we're lazy. Why bother (essentially) "adding a watch" for a variable (or more often: the 12 I'm interested in,) when I can just dump them all and scan through for the one(s) I want?

Certainly no disrespect intended; just my thoughts. :)

John Farrar said on 07-26-2007 at 12:29 PM #

Ray... that sounds like a good margin for data visibility. I would like to request that it be done in JSON with indentation if possible if you go in that direction.

Adam:
1. No one will force anyone else to use this. :)
2. Are you still using OnRequestEnd.cfm ??? Give Application.cfc a try! :) There are different ways to make life easy. If this way doesn't work for you then certainly don't use it. Some people build very rich applications and need to have more responsive debugging information.

Adam Tuttle said on 07-26-2007 at 12:32 PM #
	@John- I do indeed use Application.cfc whenever possible, but these days I find myself doing a lot more legacy code support than new development; and as the adage goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I had considered leaving the ".cfm" off to make it ambiguous. ;)

Raymond Camden said on 07-26-2007 at 12:56 PM #
	@Adam - gotcha. ColdFire isn't for everyone. :) @John - I'm not quite sure I get you. I _am_ using JSON behind the scenes. JSON doesn't have anything to do with how the data is _formatted_ though.

John Farrar said on 07-26-2007 at 1:20 PM #
	Well... when I pull a query back, and desire to know what was where that is my quest. Perhaps JSON wouldn't work... but not sure flat text is an optimal solution either.

Raymond Camden said on 07-26-2007 at 1:24 PM #
	I still don't think I get you. What do you mean by "where that is" - this Variable support simply tells you the last value. So the values are static.

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