Does ColdFusion Builder have CF code formatting built in?

[ericbelair]

CF code formatting seems like a very basic feature for a code editor, but I can't seem to find/enable it in ColdFusion Builder. I would think such a basic and useful feature that was available in Dreamweaver CS3 would be included by Adobe. The HTML and CSS formatters work great, but I wish they would implement it for CF code. Am I not seeing it, or is it missing?

[hemant_k1]

I wish we could have provided this and we wanted to, but it would not make it into this release. Sorry.

[cygro__Cyrill_Gross_]

But it has JavaScript formatting built in which sucks.

Does anybody knows how to switch it off?

[Guest]

In Preferences->HTML->Editors->Java Script->Formatting  Select  No Fomatting option from the dropdown list.Or you can click on Edit annd choose formatting appropriately

Thanks

Evelin Varghese

[codeworker]

I found it very disappointing not to have a proper source formater for CFML in a ColdFusion IDE for 300 bucks... thats seems like a joke. Codeformating for CFML works since years in Dreamweaver and even homesite.

[Adam Cameron.]

Me too.  Well: not having this feature is a major reason why I refuse to buy it.  I think this feature is one fo the minimum fundamentals that any code editor should ship with.  Even a free one, let-alone one that costs £200.

You might want to vote for this one: http://cfbugs.adobe.com/bugreport/flexbugui/cfbugtracker/main.html#bugId=78893

--

Adam

[cheftimo]

“I wish we could have provided this and we wanted to, but it would not make it into this release. Sorry.”

Is this some kind of joke and is hermant k a member of Adobe staff?

Picture buying one of those new GM cars with the 60 day return guarantee. The first 60 days the weather is beautiful; the 61^st. day it rains and you can’t find where to turn on the windshield wipers. When you call the dealer, they say “Sorry, we didn’t make for this year’s model; you’ll have to wait ‘til the 2011 model comes out”.

What would you do?

[Charlie Arehart]

No, it's not a joke, Cheftimo.Hemant is indeed on the engineering team. In fact he heads it.

He gave you a straight answer to the question.

I think your analogy is stretched. Are you saying *you* bought CFB and are annoyed now that it doesn't have formatting? No one else said that (nor did you). In any case, there's also no number of days where you can return it (that I know of, for really most any software for sale). One would more prudently decide whether to buy something after using the evaluation, which is in this case 60 days.

If one did that, and bought it, and then the next day found this missing, should they have a right to return it? Um, no. You bought it based on what you percieved the value to be when you bought it. The sudden discovery of a lack of some feature shouldn't then detract from the value that motivated the purchase. I mean, I suppose it could, but then that just seems like whining, if I'm being honest.

As for the question of "is it worth it" before buying it, that's certainly a larger question and has been addressed by two recent blog entries:

http://fusiongrokker.com/post/why-i-think-you-should-buy-coldfusion-builder

http://www.carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2010/5/25/more_on_why_buy_cfbuilde  r_

I don't presume everyone will be persuaded by the arguments, but that's ok. At least it may help some with the debate.

As for choosing not to buy simply because it lacks this one feature, well, that's a personal decision I suppose.

I will say, in conclusion, that if one really did buy it and now misses this, it can be added through a low-cost extra program which, while not an Eclipse plug-in per se, does work nicely with it (and CFBuilder). See Matt Presnall’s htmlformatter (http://www.logichammer.com/html-formatter/). Despite the product name, he's a CF guy and his docs and video intro show using it with CF and Eclipse/CFbuilder.

[codeworker]

First of all I adore Charlie, he is great person and I always like to see him presenting CF stuff.

But we should not do marketing here. The missing code formatter features is major lapse. Why not be honest and just say sorry, we couldn't wait longer to go public thus we hat to skip probably unstable features.

Nobody would blame Adobe if it would be a free or very low priced editor. When you look at the feature of IntelliJ in the java world and than compare prices...

As a CF developer you depend quite a bit on CFbuilder - at least when you do CF9 development. No other editor can do full script cfc at this time with code completion and code coloring (please correct me, if I'm wrong here and miss an editor which can do script based cfc).

Thus as a Adobe customer who buys many server licenses and convince many customers to follow the ColdFudion path I expect a decent editor at a decent price... otherwise it just makes me thinking more to switch to groovy/grails as some colleagues just do now.

[cheftimo]

Preface: I have been a CFer (and a fan of Charlie Arehart) since the product was called Allaire ColdFusion, and have been using Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash et al since version 2. If I did not think highly of these products, I wouldn’t be bothering with all this writing.

My issue is not specifically the lack of formatting: this thread caught my eye and I saw it as a good chance to comment in general on how our intelligence is being insulted by Adobe.

I am a former chef/restaurateur and got involved in software (which made me realize a menu is not a list of dishes) because I wanted my restaurant site to be like my food, i.e. homemade. If you came to eat there and ordered veal scallops and I was out of those that day, I would not keep my mouth shut, serve you sliced turkey breast and assume you would be stupid enough not to notice (although that sort of thing is more prevalent than the public thinks); I would tell you up front “we are out of veal”, thus giving you the option of selecting something else or walking out, even if I lost a sale, or even a customer.

In any business (the software industry seemingly being the exception), you develop a product and when it’s ready – provides the features and benefits you advertise - you release it; you do not take your customers’ money before then. Doing it the other way around is plain sloppy, unprofessional and dishonest. So I beg to differ: Hermant’s “I wish we could have provided this and we wanted to, but it would not make it into this release. Sorry” is a lame excuse, not a straight answer; I don’t see how my analogy with the new car purchase is “stretched”.

You cannot verify every single feature of a product like CF Builder in an evaluation period of a few weeks, even if you spend 24/7 trying. So, one of the things you do is review the help docs (the owner’s manual, so to speak). Perhaps Hermant or someone else would care to explain why, for example, Adobe help documents include features like ‘Create CFC from AS’, or ‘Query Builder’, neither of which exists. To me, it would be acceptable if they left those things out of the docs – but don’t BS me by putting them there for me to see, because those are items I rely on in my evaluation of the product; it amounts to misrepresentation. (In the case of those two particular features, it’s easy for those of us who view CF Builder as an upgrade from the free ColdFusion Extensions for Flex Builder to assume they are there and they work as they did in those extensions).

One would think Adobe people know what they are doing, but I have a few doubts:

·       they threw away a great CF editor – HomeSite – and are just now getting around to giving us an alternative with this CF Builder (just throwing a bunch of CF tags into Dreamweaver didn’t cut it, did it?);

·       they canned Freehand in favor of a piece of crap they call Illustrator – this thread http://forums.adobe.com/thread/240590?tstart=0 has elicited over 46,000 views and close to 500 replies;

·       now they are trying to make FlashBuilder into a WYSIWYG ActionScript editor with this “data-centric” BS – now a short-order cook can build an app in an hour (yeah, right! Don’t even get me started on that).

Yet I am still sticking with and rooting for them. I hope that won’t turn out to be a big mistake.

Regards to y’all,

Carlos

[Charlie Arehart]

Wow, @codeworker and @cheftimo/Carlos, I do certainly appreciate your kind regards but am bummed to have been a lightning rod for your venting your angst.

Of course, I'm not Adobe, so I can't speak to why they did or didn't include a code formatter, or why they may have missed cleaning up references to features in the docs that didn't make the final version (there is a "query editor", if you right-click inside of a CFQUERY, though it's not quite the same as the old query builder).

I'm also not a counselor, so I honestly admit to not knowing how to answer the rest of your observations in a way that won't just enflame things. All I'll say is that I absolutely stick by my assertion that there are definitely features that many (many) people are happily leveraging and which have motivated them to buy the product.That was all I was really trying to communicate (here and in another recent thread in the forum). I was just wanting to point out (for those who may appreciate it) why they may want to consider points of value that they may have missed (it is a big product).

To your (new) analogy of the restaurant, though, isn't this just a case where if you didn't like the food, you would leave and not come back? I just don't quite get the animosity, and the feeling that Adobe has perpetrated an irresponsible act here. Those who are not satisfied with the product (after 6 weeks) obviously have no compulsion to buy it. I hear you saying that someone might be "misled" by a couple of old references in the docs to features that didn't make it, but really, those hardly seem to be make-or-break features--and if they were, then certainly they should have been tested by anyone who expected to rely upon them.

Again, I am not experienced in counseling, nor grief- or anger-management. And I'm not saying that flippantly. It's clear some here are angered and perhaps grieved (over loss of past products and how that's been handled). I am not apologizing for Adobe on that. I have nothing to say (no dog in the fight). I just felt I couldn't leave the replies unanswered, though part of me thinks I should. Again, guys, I'm not trying to pick a fight. I just wanted to offer those couple of thoughts in response.

As you've been so kind in your regards, I'll ask for your grace if somehow I've tempted you to respond in anger. I think you've made your point clear already.

[Abram Adams]

For me, CFB was a $50 add on to FlashBuilder, and well worth it.  I have to admit that if it weren't for the need to purchase FlashBuilder I would probably have waited until CFB was a bit more mature, but I don't regret my purchase and I don't think Adobe is sticking it to us in any way.

To make things a little lighter around here, here's some things I like about CFB:

1. The fact that my CF and Flex/Air projects are in the same IDE - to me that made it worth it.

2. I can extend it with CF (I haven't and may never, but I can).  Better yet, smart guys like Ben Nadel can extend it with cool regex magic extensions.

3. There are many eclipse plugins that I can integrate with (version control, project management, tracking, etc...)

4. CTL+click on a function and boom, you're taken to the function... this works better in FB, but me hopes this gets bettered in versions to come.

5. Code Insight, brilliant.

Sure DW is still a better editor in some regards (nicer syntax highlights, better search/replace, etc...) but it wasn't always that way - and I think it peaked about 3 versions ago.  CFB on the other hand has a much more extensible platform, which I think will lend to quickly surpassing what DW (and others) can do.

I still reserve the right to rag on CFB when it doesn't give me code asist when I want it or bugs out on me, but I don't recall a version 1 of anything that didn't have a thing or two worth fixing/adding.

[Charlie Arehart]

Thanks for the follow-up Abram. I'll share a couple of thoughts.

As for the points which sold you on it, I'll just reiterate that in my first message in this thread I pointed to two blog entries (one by Adam Tuttle and a follow-up by myself) that listed those and many more.

But the real reason I want to reiterate it is that in my blog entry, someone complained of the ctrl-hover not working, and I (and others) have offered info that seem could help at least some people with the problem. Just saying you may want to check it out, as it should work. See the comments at:

http://www.carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2010/5/25/more_on_why_buy_cfbuilder_

HTH.

/charlie

[codeworker]

Charlie, the strong response came because your message (and blog entry) sounded quite a bit like 'what-do--you-complain-just-praise-what-we-got from-Adobe'. But when you code daily for 8-10 hours these things are important thats why you buy IDE. And it's just not fun to pay for a partly unfinished product. It probably also depends if you compare it with DW or something like IntelliJ

Back to the main topic: Meanwhile I go with html formatter.  You can drag a file from within eclipse over the icon and it formats the source. it works great and it's well worth the 9$. I just wish it would be an Eclipse plug-in 😉
http://www.logichammer.com/html-formatter/

[Charlie Arehart]

@codeworker, we just won't agree on this point. My reponses have been focused on your and ChefTimo's suggestion that there's been some reprehensible sort of bait and switch, or that this one feature is the absolute killer need which, lacking it, makes CFB not worth buying at all. I just don't agree with either point. But I respect your right to disagree. I was just offering counter points.

And then, yes, I did try to turn attention to the (I think equally valuable) discussion of "why might one consider buying CFB", despite that concern, in case others came upon the thread. People can freely decide for themselves.

@Abram, that's an interesting observation. I'd just not noticed it yet. Great point to identify that FB handles the prefixed custom tags better. May just have been an oversight to the CFB team (it's not a feature that a lot of people use, at least from my experience.) But you should definitely file a bug report/feature request for it.

[cheftimo]

Hey Charlie, please understand that my beef is not with ColdFusion – or with you; it’s with Adobe’s sloppiness.

I know bugs are part of the deal with any software, especially when it’s just released for the first time, but the least Adobe should do is include somewhere in the help when and why certain things don’t work. For example, it should not have taken me a couple of days to learn that the ORM CFC generator only works with CF 9; I found out about that almost accidentally in some blog.

I have high hopes for CF Builder to finally giving us an alternative to Allaire’s HomeSite. Dreamweaver is nice, but as a CF IDE, it never even came close.

Peace,

Carlos

[Charlie Arehart]

OK, but some of the tone has been far more polemic than irenic (even the word "sloppiness" is harsh). That's the sort of thing I've been reacting to.

Yes, sometimes things slip, and it is a 1.0 product.

All that said, and though I really don't want to dwell or reopen wounds, but do you really think someone running other than CF9 should have expected the ORM CFC generator to work? ORM is a unique feature of CF9, after all. Just thought that needed to be said. But I will agree that the docs could still be improved, and the solutions to problems made more apparent. (That's part of why I shared the list, to let people know what at least should work that makes the tool more valuable.)

Anyway, I'd love to close the week focusing on your last word, "peace". Good one, and let's all enjoy the long weekend (for the US). Actually, I've got one last chapter due for a book, so no relaxing in the sun for me:-)

/charlie

[cheftimo]

Yeah, my mother never told me I should have been a diplomat.

I am assuming we are talking about Object Relational Mapping.

That concept has been around since anybody knew there would be a ColdFusion 9. Since the docs say that CF Builder works with CF 7, 8 and 9, yes, it’s reasonable to expect the ORM CFC generator works unless somebody tells you otherwise (as in the help docs or sales literature). When I was looking into the product, I was trying to learn about CF Builder, not about ColdFusion itself.

As I said, peace.

Carlos

[Abram Adams]

Thanks Charlie, great points on your blog.

Perhaps I should clarify what I meant regarding FB's CTL+Hover being better; correct me if I'm mistaken, but CFB doesn't seem to yet link to custom tags (unless you cfmodule them in).

Example:

You can CTL+click the file path below and it opens the file:

<cfmodule template="/extensions/customtags/dataform/form.cfm">

However, you can't CTL+click the cfimported (or cf_ syntax) version:

<cfimport taglib="/extensions/customtags/dataform/" prefix="dataform">
<dataform:form>

In FB you can have a custom component like:

<s:WindowedApplication..... xmlns:components="com.mystuff.components.*">
<components:form/>

And when you click on the <componetns:form/> tag it opens that file.  FB seems much more "aware" of it's project than CFB does at this point, but FB is also on version 4....

[rtcpenguin]

Any plans for upcoming source formatting? Or maybe an add-on?

[Adam Cameron.]

If you look in the CFB bug tracker, there was a bunch of errors raised during what I can only imagine was the internal testing of a source formatting facility planned for a subsequent release. They showed up round about when the recent updated came out, so I guess they were trying to get it into that, but it didn't end up making the cut.

Here's hoping there's another updated soon...

--

Adam

[moniqueb52041408]

10 years later and I am hee searching for a formatter SMH

[BKBK]

Hi moniqueb52041408 ,

Welcome back! 10 years is a long time. ColdFusion and Builder have both moved on. I would therefore advise you to start a new thread.