Posted in ColdFusion | Posted on 03-01-2010 | 3,098 views
Ok, so this is another tip that is more Eclipse than ColdFusion Builder, but I thought I'd share it anyway. (I'm assuming a lot of people who will be using CFBuilder will be new to Eclipse as well!) I've mentioned before how I like to use TailView when debugging. I find it especially useful in MVC applications with a lot of moving parts in each request. I've also demonstrated how I use JSON and CFLOG to record complex data to a log file. While that works ok, sometimes I really need to use a proper CFDUMP to see what I'm working with. In those cases, I'll cfdump to a file (with format="html"):
Useful? Maybe. In this particular case it was helpful to me. I was working on an issue within a loop inside cfchart. The dumps helped me track the data being supplied to the chart and where it was going wrong.


There is also a hidden gem, that while line debugging you can switch over to the Debug Output Buffer. Select the Server output Buffer and watch the request build up as well.
So in some cases, if you do a dump here you don't need to write it to a file. You can view it in the IDE as well.
I think the line debugger doesn't get enough attention, it beats the cfdumps hands down for me.