Raymond Camden

New ColdFusion Builder Extension - jsonview

by Raymond Camden on

This post is more than 2 years old.

I'm not sure how useful this is, but earlier today I needed to quickly turn a JSON string into formatted data. I could do this in ColdFusion with one line of code, but I wanted it even faster. I found a great online viewer here: http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/ but I thought it would be kind of fun to build it into CFBuilder as well. I whipped up the following extension in about 20 minutes: http://jsonview.riaforge.org. It allows you to enter either a URL or a block of JSON:

Once entered, you just submit the form and can then see the rendered JSON:

Probably not very useful - but heck - once again let me just say how much I fracking love the fact that I was able to extend ColdFusion Builder to meet my needs!

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About Raymond Camden

Raymond is a senior developer evangelist for Adobe. He focuses on document services, JavaScript, and enterprise cat demos. If you like this article, please consider visiting my Amazon Wishlist or donating via PayPal to show your support. You can even buy me a coffee!

Lafayette, LA https://www.raymondcamden.com

Archived Comments

Comment 1 by todd sharp posted on 9/11/2010 at 11:18 PM

I love it! Can't you optionally prepopulate it with selected code?

Comment 2 by Raymond Camden posted on 9/12/2010 at 12:55 AM

CFB supports that - but that felt like a use case I wouldn't need. If my CFM was outputting json, I'd just do the one line there.

Comment 3 by Ben Nadel posted on 9/12/2010 at 2:43 PM

Ray, I've finally started to embrace ColdFusion Builder :) When I switched to Mac, I also went builder. Looking forward to playing around with the extension stuff more. Cool stuff.

On a related note to this, FireBug now has HTML/JSON tabs in their AJAX request monitoring such that if you get a response that is seen as AJAX or HTML, they will give you a tab to see raw data rendered as something. That's been suuuuper helpful for debugging ColdFusion errors that come back in my AJAX :D

Comment 4 by Raymond Camden posted on 9/12/2010 at 6:12 PM

That's nice Ben - but all the cool kids are on Chrome now. You got to catch up. :P Seriously though - that sounds useful. Chrome has nice dev tools that mostly mimic Firebug, but it's not quite as polished.

Comment 5 by Ben Nadel posted on 9/14/2010 at 6:53 AM

@Ray, I've definitely started to use Chrome for a lot of stuff; it's fast and seems to be much better about memory usage (plus, I love how easily I can drag tabs around)... buuuuut, FireFox was my first love and it's hard to give up :)

Comment 6 by Raymond Camden posted on 9/14/2010 at 6:55 AM

What cinched it for me was watching how long it took Firefox to start up. I don't think it was that much slower _after_ but the initial launch was slow as crap.

Comment 7 by Ben Nadel posted on 9/14/2010 at 7:09 AM

Yeah, it truly is a fast app. There's also a few sites (ex. Flickr, ING Direct) that I simply won't use on FireFox as they just kill the browser.