Simple cfc mapping issue = I am a muppet

Report · Jul 07, 2010

Right, there's something blissfully simple that I'm just missing here, but I've had by C# hat on for weeks and now have had to come back to CF and I've gotten stuck on a simple issue.

Yes, I've trawled Google and the search on here but I just can't spend any more time on this, so thought I'd post on here so someone can abuse my noobishness.

All I want is a simple mapping to a cfc directory for creating components. In order to avoid issues with mappings coinciding with physical directories, I've made them a little more unique but still nothing. My folder structure is currently thus (simplified):

/htdocs

/badgers

Something.cfc

/quotenew

index.cfm

What I want to do is to create an Application-level mapping (ie not in CF admin) to the cfc directory. My Application.cfc has the following lines at the top:

THIS.Mappings = {} ;
THIS.Mappings["horses"] = 'badgers' ;

Then in /quotenew/index.cfm I have the following line:

But I'm getting the dreaded "Could not find the ColdFusion Component or Interface horses.Something." error.

I've tried everything I can think of but just can't figure out whether I've done something stupid or whether it would never work in the first place but as I said, I'm well out of practise. If anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd be most appreciative.

O.

Report · Jul 07, 2010

Consider what values you'd put in to CFAdmin if you were making that mapping... and hopefully notice what you're missing from your statement in Application.cfc.

Hint: what's the first character of the logical path you'd specify for any mapping you make in CFAdmin?

Hint 2: it's in the docs: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/Developing/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec0b63c-7fd5.html#WS0C5B9A8B-32B5-4db2-BC04-B76DF8823A34 (it took me a bit to find this, so I wouldn't be concerned if you missed it when you looked).

--

Adam

Report · Jul 07, 2010

THIS.Mappings["horses"] = 'badgers' ;

More advice: be very careful when putting a saddle on that particular "horse".

--

Adam

Report · Jul 07, 2010

Ah, it seems I'd done two things wrong.

Firstly, I needed a forward slash at the start of the mapping, which I believe is what Adam was getting at.

Secondly when doing mappings it seems you can only do them to physical directories, not CFC paths. At first I thought this was odd (and it's caught me out before) as if I can do createObject("system.cfc.classes.MyClass") then why can't I have a mapping to "system.cfc.classes"?

I can only assume this is to keep mappings generic - they can be used for physical directories and component paths so I guess the physical path is required.

All sorted now with this:

THIS.Mappings["/horses"] = 'g:\websites\mywebsite\htdocs\badgers' ;

Not quite as clean as I would have liked but still, if it's what needs doing.

Cheers Adam

O.

Report · Jul 07, 2010

Trying to do a mapping to a dotted CFC path is a bit of a circular idea, because CF needs to know where in the file system the CFC dotted path points to to be able to resolve it to a CFC file.

Also, as you touch on, CF mappings are for more things than just CFC resolution.

However you can use expandPath() on the RHS of the mapping, so I do this sort of thing:

this.mappings["/myapp"] = expandPath("/com/mycompany/myapp/");

One does not need to hard-code the entire path.

--

Adam

Report · Jul 07, 2010

Ah yes, that's a little tidier - I've always been careful with getCurrentTemplatePath() as I know in certain circumstances (onRequestStart()?) it can cause unexpected behaviour if the calling page is in a subdirectory - however I do appreciate it works in this case.

UsingexpandPath() is certainly tidier, so I reckon I'll use that.

Cheers

O.