Linked Folder

[remmarg]

I have been developing ASP.Net web sites in Visual Studio for years. Now I am trying to learn ColdFusion. I like what I have seen so far. I have tried to take a training class twice this year only to have it cancelled. So I took an Old class online that is obsolete Coldfusion10 and not fully compatible with version I am running "ColdFusion 2016" I am trying to use ColdFusion Builder 2018. I have an issue I can't seem to solve. I have a sample ColdFusion website from the class I took on line and I can open/browse it in IIS. But when I try to open the main page in Builder "Index.cfm" I get this message.

"Selected file is not in the document root of the server. it the project is not in the document root, create a linked folder to the document root (selecting Project Properties > ColdFusion Project)."

She here is what I did.

1. I created a new ColdFusion project.

2. One by one I imported the files from my sample website

3. Then I click the Run button.

I'm sure this sounds small to you but when your lost as to what to do this stops everything.

Also can some one recommend a class that will not be cancelled.

[WolfShade]

Hello, remmarg, and welcome to the forums.

As someone who has been developing CF for 19 years, I am really curious as to why you would want to start learning CF.  TBH, ColdFusion has been losing popularity for over a decade, and I've been to many job interviews (over 7 years ago, granted) that were looking for CF devs to help port their apps to other platforms (like .Net), and I'm not seeing many jobs in my local area (St Louis, MO) that are looking for CF developers.

If you are truly dedicated to using CF Builder, I can't help you with your issue as I gave up on CFB a long time ago.  It's an Eclipse-based IDE and I've never liked Eclipse.  I've been using DreamWeaver, and it's very easy to setup a project in DW.  There are also IDEs such as NotePad++, or even Adobe's Brackets, that are much easier (IMHO) to use than CFB.

But, it sounds to me as though when you set up this project in CFB, you picked one folder as the project root but are saving files to another.  Again, I'm no longer familiar with CFB, so the way projects are set up are probably different from when I last used CFB (v2) many moons ago.

V/r, (Very respectfully)

^ _ ^

[remmarg]

WolfShade. I hear both good and bad things about ColdFusion. Where I work we try to share web tools we created at one Factory wit other Factories in our organization. We recently created a "Group" of developers from facilities all over North America. As we started sharing I quickly became aware that some sites were using Primarily Cold Fusion and for me to use there files I installed a Cold Fusion server but I need to be able to manage and adapt there stuff to work at our site. I am not "switching" from net to ColdFusion just trying to get my hands around this. I am already handling a lot of different technologies. We still have an Open VMS server that I have to maintain. And I make extensive use of SSIS and SSRS. I am also the local Sql Server DBA. Not to mention a lot of hardware and networking things. To answer your question I just need to add this to my skill set. I choose Builder because I was using Notepad ++ and wanted something more intuitive. Like Visual Studio.

[Dave Watts]

"I choose Builder because I was using Notepad ++ and wanted something more intuitive. Like Visual Studio."

So, this is why I don't use CF Builder. It doesn't really bring anything like what VS has for .NET development. There's nothing "visual" about the vast majority of CF development. It's far more primitive than that. One of the nice things is that CFML is high-level enough that you get pretty much everything you need for development with a good editor. I would recommend Notepad++ over CF Builder, actually. I'd recommend VSCode with one of the several CFML language support libraries over CF Builder too.

Note that this is just my opinion, man, and if other people have their own different opinions that's fine with me.

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC

[Charlie Arehart]

I hope you don't mean you imported the FILEs one by one. There would have been no reason to do that.

And to be clear, you do NOT need to use the "run" feature in CFBuilder. It's a convenience, but it's merely opening a browser to the URL that you could type yourself. Still, there are ways to associate a URL with a project, and that would be your next step now that you have created a project.

Still, rather than detail the steps, I'd rather "teach you to fish", as the saying goes.

Your need now is to simply get up to speed with using CFBuilder. I realize one could reasonably hope/expect to just open it and go to work, but it's VERY different from Visual Studio. Indeed, it's very different from traditional CFML editors that preceded it like Dreamweaver and CF Studio, or more popular current editors like VisualStudio Code, Sublime Text, and NotePad++ (all of which offer CFML extensions to ease working with CFML in them). And surely some will just recommend you switch to one of them, the current darling of the community being Visual Studio Code (for good reason, and which is free).

But for someone wanting to get the most out of (or simply forced to use) CF Builder, note that there is an entire guide for it, as well as (what may suit you better) a "getting started" guide, at Getting started with Adobe ColdFusion Builder (2018 release) . It would be 18 pages if printed and will really help you, I think.

Then as for the complete guide,  it's available not only in the help of CFBuilder itself but also online at ColdFusion Help | ColdFusion User Guide .  There are still other online resources you can find, but to beware relying on ones that are too old. Indeed, you may find readily via google searching what seems a "great" PDF  of the CFBuilder docs, at https://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusionBuilder/Using/cfbuilder_help.pdf. But note that it's from 2010, which is the CF9 era, and it's about an OLD version of  CFBuilder. It was changed quite substantially in the CF10 (2012) era. Look instead to what I link to above.

But some don't like to read, and you asked about training. If you mean for CFBuilder, I have not seen any class about it specifically, but note that it was covered in the substantial free 9-hour series of training videos that Adobe released about getting started with CF2016, available as a youtube playlist here: Getting Started with Adobe ColdFusion (2016 release) - YouTube

And FWIW, I offer a link to that and several OTHER free trainign resources in a category of my CF411 site, here:
http://www.cf411.com/cftrainingfree

And I offer there a category as well for CF trainers (with paid training), at http://www.cf411.com/cftrainers , but as you experienced often the challenge is getting them to commit to a date, if they don't get "enough" students. With so many free resources (online training, youtube vidoes, Adobe online docs/guides, and more), it's no wonder that folks offering training find fewer and fewer interested students. (It's certainly not because there's not plenty to teach about CF, as it's changing in useful ways every 2 years).

And since that last comment will surely bring out the skeptics, I would say that it's also NOT because "no one is using CF anymore", because clearly Adobe would not be in the business of offering it, let alone updating it, if that were true. And my own business, having over 1000 clients for my CF troubleshooting consulting and getting a new client about every week also let's me say with confidence that CF is not dead, nor even dying. I realize others will argue that point. This is not the place for that. I only brought it up in the context of the challenge one may have with finding training. It's simply less and less needed with so many online resources.

@remmarg, I hope that what I shared above helps you.

PS I see that you offered a similar but different variation of this same question in the CF Portal. Since some will see this and not that, or vice-versa, I will go offer a link there to my answer here.

[Charlie Arehart]

Wow, wolfshade and I posted our answers at the exact same time. Two quite different perspectives on things. Folks can choose between them. 🙂

And FWIW, I don't share what I do because I am a huge fan of CFBuilder. I simply offer it because I acknowledge that some folks choose to or are required to use it.

I also know from having helped people with it for about a decade, many problems people have with it are solved by better understanding and configuring it (which is true of ALL editors and IDEs). It's also ALWAYS painful when people move to a new editor/IDE, whatever it is, simply because it's different. That said, as wolf said, the fact that CFB is based on Eclipse has always been an additional challenge, as it's quite different (and much older) than most IDEs out there.

Still another challenge for CFBuilder is that many people had encountered issues with it over the years, and even if Adobe may have long-since solved those issues, many folks "dropped it" and have continued to share their dismay and discouragement (indeed loathing) of it in the years since. (I'm not putting Wolf in that category, but anyone watching the space objectively should agree with this assessment.)

So given that so many don't read Adobe's resources about how to use the tool, and instead hear only what they find online in Google searching--and that mostly quite dated and generally antagonistic, it's indeed no wonder that many would come away with or even still harbor ill will toward the tool.

And some may assert that Adobe seems to finally throwing in the towel. There have been rumors lately that they are planning to jump on the Visual Studio Code (vscode) bandwagon and support one of the CFML extensions for that. For now, it's not clear if that means INSTEAD of updating/supporting/extending CFB, or in addition to it. Time will tell (or perhaps they may chime in here).

[remmarg]

Charlie,

Concerning

"PS I see that you offered a similar but different variation of this same question in the CF Portal. Since some will see this and not that, or vice-versa, I will go offer a link there to my answer here."

Your right. I thought I was posting on a forum apparently I was not so I moved it to here.

I appreciate your response and I will take advantage of your links. In the mean time is there a simple answer to my problem concerning Linked Folders?

The classes I signed up for before were not free Learning Tree sub contracted to an Abobe Vendor ant it was about $3000. Although it is kind of scary that I can't easily find a class.

Jeff Grammer!!remmarG ffeJ

[Dave Watts]

There aren't a lot of CF classes around, that's for sure. My company used to offer them until last year. The problem with CF training - and a lot of other training classes - is that it's hard to get enough students into classes to make them cover their own costs. This isn't just a CF problem, actually, but is certainly the case for CF classes. You might be able to find a private instructor, but the rates for private training are set differently. For me, for example, it's a certain amount for each day of training regardless of how many students you'd have in attendance. This benefits you if you have a lot of students, obviously, but would be quite expensive for a single student.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this. It's not just that CF is dying or whatever - I don't think that's exactly true - but:

- Adobe isn't willing to develop training or sell it themselves,

- not enough students (as mentioned above),

- there is a certain amount of feeling within the industry that CF is a dying language,

- CF is easy enough for developers coming from .NET or PHP or whatever, usually. CF is easier than those languages, I think, and I know all three of them fairly well at this point.

Back to "CF is dying" - well, everything is dying. This is the natural way of things. But for a dying language, CF has certainly been doing it slowly. As a result, there are a lot of places where CF is still around and will be around for a long time to come. The US government, for example, uses TONS of CF, because they built a lot of internal, mission-critical apps around it and, well, it's hard to replace those kinds of apps. And Lucee is around, which actually helps Adobe's CF out in a way - it makes CFML something that's not entirely dependent on one vendor.

So, back to training. One good thing about CF is that it really hasn't changed that much over the last few versions. If you're able to find any training materials from CF 10 on, they'll still mostly be accurate. And there are books, web sites, etc for that. If you do need private training and can afford to pay exorbitant rates (assuming it's just for you), let people on here know and someone will respond. This again will be pretty expensive because you'll be taking up a trainer's entire day, so we're talking about an hourly rate plus set-up time, plus travel if you want to be in the same room with the trainer. Fortunately, this kind of training can be done quite well remotely, using web conferencing and cloud server instances set up just for the class.

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC

[Dave Watts]

As others have mentioned, CF Builder is based on Eclipse. Here's what I recall of how this works. It's been a long time since I've used CF Builder, though. Eclipse has its own, arguably somewhat peculiar, approach to where it puts files and how you get them to where they ultimately need to go. In Eclipse, you create a workspace, which typically is somewhere in your own local Windows profile if you're on Windows. But your CF server, or more specifically IIS in this case, doesn't typically store its web root in your local Windows profile, so you have to have some way to get files from your workspace to IIS.

CF Builder's default approach to doing this is to configure a RDS connection to CF/IIS. When you save your project, you'll be able to deploy it to CF/IIS via RDS, which connects via HTTP to a "fake" URL that CF uses for management requests. RDS must be enabled within the CF Administrator for this to work.

Now, this is a significant amount of work if everything's on the same machine, so you might find it easier just to configure your workspace directory to point to your IIS webroot and call it a day. If you do this, you'll lose some of the RDS functionality for other things like building SQL queries, etc, but you might not need or want that anyway.

I think this link is still relevant.

ColdFusion Help | Manage projects in ColdFusion Builder

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC