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Known Participant
December 2, 2010
Question

Extended Find Like in Homesite?

  • December 2, 2010
  • 6 replies
  • 5933 views

I am looking to see if ColdFusion builder has an Extended Find feature like what was in Homesite 5.x.  I use this feature all the time, but can't seem to figure out how to use the Search feature in CFBuilder.  Can anyone offer suggestions?

Thanks!

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6 replies

Known Participant
February 24, 2011

The only thing I find lacking in the CF Builder search functionality (which is basically Eclipse search functionality) is multi-line find and replace.  You CAN do this with regular expressions but I find it ridiculous.  Homesite had this functionality and it is truly the only thing I miss.  I use a program called Actual Search and Replace (the website is terrible but the app is great).  It's nice because it'll backup your files if you tell it to.

New Participant
February 11, 2011

I feel your pain!!!  I don't think you can do the extended search in CFB.  I too use it all the time in Homesite - love to be able to find all of a specific tag in a file or search thru hundreds of files.  CFB blows.  They tried to create something that is a cross between Homesite and Visual Studio - and failed.

Inspiring
February 11, 2011

I agree that not having a search across RDS is a pain, but - to be frank - anything that discourages people from developing across an RDS link is a good thing.  It's just a bad way of developing code.  But I agree what CFB delivers in this regard is a backwards step compared to Allaire's (Allaire's!!! Not even Macromedia's let alone Adobe's!) offering vis-a-vis search.  They should deliver - as a minimum - what earlier products delivered.

I was going to say that DW's extended search for "tags with certain attribute [values]" is something easily done with a regex, so no great loss.  However I stopped to think whether I could replicate all that functionality with my knowledge of regexes (said knowledge is not perfect, but it's not shabby ;-), and I've decided it's too complicated to simply suggest "use regex searches instead".  So, yes, that's another area in which CFB is a backwards step from its antiquitous and onbsolete colleagues.

CFB needs to to all this stuff that CFS and DW used to do for CF developers.  As a minimum.

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Adam

Inspiring
January 21, 2011

Hi guys,

Apparently nobody answered the original question so if nobody minds getting back on topic, here I go .

The feature you are looking for is called site wide search if I'm not mistaken. A few years back I found some plugins for Eclipse which promised just that. Having tried some and never got it to work properly I abonded the search for it.

Ofcourse you could always hit Ctrl-H and use the dialog presented to search the 'enclosing project'. Replace also available in the same dialog. It works just fine for me.

Cheers Bert.

Inspiring
January 21, 2011

Ofcourse you could always hit Ctrl-H and use the dialog presented to search the 'enclosing project'. Replace also available in the same dialog. It works just fine for me.

Yeah, but the initial requierment (well: I say initial, but it wasn't in the initial post) was for the search to do its bit over an RDS connection.  And none of the searches in CFB will do this.

I did suggest CTRL-H (well: I suggested via the menus) in my second response...

--

Adam

benalembick
Known Participant
January 19, 2011

Hi Guys,

Thanks for all your responses, Adam, ignorant is definatley the correct word to use regarding my bosses. I am currently working for a IT Sales company, I develop their Internal / External sales systems, and as long as they get thier systems delivered they dont really care about the development process behind it. This makes it hard for me as i am having to work with very old legacy code, The back up systems they have in place was never designed for code backup. (meaning i have to manually backup code and SQL Dbs).

The more i think about it the more I really want to convince them to allow me some time to implement a change to the process. Problem is as far as they are concerned they arnt getting anything out of it.

There is only one developer working on the systems (me) however I am trying to get that changed, so I guess the first step is going to be tackling this.

I will look into CFB versioning, Is SVN the most common still?

Thanks again

Ben

Inspiring
January 19, 2011

In some ways, source control is like insurance.  A complete waste of time until one needs it.  Then it's essential.

I think people are erring towards GIT these days.  I've never used it, but read up on it when it first came out.  One of its benefits is it decentralises the respository, which can be useful I guess.  Other than that one of its claims is that it's easier to do branching & merging than SVN... but in al the examples I read, the process was exactly the same, so I don't get what they're on about.

I've used VSS, CVS and SVN.  VSS and CVS are rubbish, I can confirm that.  SVN is one of my favourite pieces of software, because I find it a real time saver.  But if I was in your position of just starting out, I'd look at GIT too.

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Adam

benalembick
Known Participant
January 19, 2011

Thanks Adam, When i had played with GIT I had read a few people mention that if they hadnt already implemented SVN then they would give GIT a go, guess the downside is that there arnt as many people using it therefore not as many to answer questions when you get a prob :-)

When people say decentalise the repository what do they mean?

(if anyone has some good resource for getting GIT installed please share id be very grateful :-))

Cheers

benalembick
Known Participant
January 18, 2011

Hi,

I must confess that i am also in the same boat as THEIDEABULB I think im still in love with homesite, even after now using CFB for about a year (i think), I still have Homesit open every day in the background to do my find and replaces.

I rasied a request back in March

http://cfbugs.adobe.com/bugreport/flexbugui/cfbugtracker/main.html#bugId=82472

I must say i have come across a few bugs with CFB and have logged them all however they all appear to still be issues.

THEIDEABULB I know what you mean about 'the problem with forums' I also develop remotley (RDS,FTP / dev, staging, live) and whenever i have mentioned this before I get the third degree, from everyone. People only mean well and I must agree with them, working locally would be great for source control and speed.

I would love to implement a change in process and start to develop Locally, and use some source control, in fact i have managed to get a test environment going with "GIT" however Time is money and my employers current targets dont really see this as a prioroty (regardless of my constant pleading) (we have a very intensive backup system in place anyway).

Could some one suggest some ways it might be possible to persuade management that this change in process is worthwhile (without mentioning backup) and

any tips on how to do it?

Cheers in advance

Ben

Charlie Arehart
Community Expert
January 18, 2011

Ben, things depend greatly on how many developers are involved. If perhaps you are on your own, you could just consider installing the free CF developer edition on your local machine, and develop and test there. Then you can just FTP changes up to the server. No "need" for version control, but it will often help you. Then again, CFBuilder/Eclipse has a built-in poor man's version control, in its "local history" feature, but it really is bare bones compares to a real VCS (then again, it may be all that some need, so don't dismiss it.)

If you do have multiple developers, a VCS really would be wise, but it also begs the question of whether to have each developer with their own copy of CF, and/or have a central testing server (which is now "free" as of CF9: if you buy a prod license, you can use it freely for testing servers). I'll leave it to others to elaborate on both version control and dev/test server configs and their pros/cons.

Of course, whether you have one or multiple developers, when you talk about doing development on a box separate from production, someone will of course then ask, "but what about the database". That's certainly another matter. You could keep a local copy of that (again, there are free versions of even the commercial database servers like SQL Server and Oracle, which I offer links to at http://www.cf411.com/#dbfree), or you could perhaps connect from your local environment to your remote prod db (but that may not work, and may not be wise).

Hope that's a start at your answer.

/charlie

/Charlie (troubleshooter, carehart. org)
New Participant
January 18, 2011

I agree with Charlie that source control is very important, but it depends on your company.  I'm from a small company of only four developers (five if you count the CEO).  We have a development server that we use to modify/test code and then a production server that we push our changes to.  We have our own way of using source control.  My boss created a cf page that lists all the files on our development server which we can "check out" and "check in", so to speak.  It doesn't physically block access from anyone modifying a page that is checked out - but we can see who has what pages checked out and it seems to work for us.

Inspiring
December 2, 2010

Just in case someone knows CFB well, but wouldn't know HS5.x from a bar of soap... what does this feature do?

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Adam

JEFFMACEAuthor
Known Participant
December 2, 2010

Good point.

It was very easy, I was able to view all my RDS servers and go to a folder and i would be able to search that folder and subfolders for any type of text that i needed, then it would just show the pages and tell me the lines that the code i was looking for was on.  So if I was looking for all instances of application.myvariable, it would then show me every instance, i could click on that search result and it would open the page and take me right to it.   I loved it and used it non stop.

Inspiring
December 2, 2010

I dunno about the RDS side of things, but it sounds like Search > File to me.

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Adam