Category: ColdFusion

Not of type Numeric when it damn well is...

I have a problem, and it's ColdFusion... We're working on some complex object interaction, and moving data in and out of our objects. Part of the "moving in" part involves building out a structure of arguments based on query columns, and then passing them all in via the ArgumentCollection. Unfortunately, ColdFusion doesn't love us here at lynda.com... It's pitching a fit and saying that our IDs aren't of type numeric, when I know damn well that they are (grumble grumble)... To demonstrate my point I've come up with the following code example. This fails every time for me:

That generates the following error: The argument ID passed to function init() is not of type numeric. Has anyone else come across this same error? Is there some hotfix that fixes this? It's completely stymied our development... The only way around it is to set our arguments to accept type="any", which honestly is unacceptable...
14 comments | Posted by Daniel Short on Jan 4, 2007 at 12:00 AM | Categories: ColdFusion - Dreamweaver - Rambling -

Ant, Eclipse, and FTP

I'm having an absolute bear of a time getting Eclipse to play nicely with Subversion, Eclipse, and an Ant build file. One of the wonderful things about working with Dreamweaver is the great FTP integration. I can upload, download, all that wonderful stuff, with a single keyboard shortcut directly in the IDE. I'm not having any such luck with Eclipse.

I think the problem is that I'm not only needing FTP access, I also need Subversion/Subclipse integration. It's my understanding that I can "import" from an FTP site and I forever have a connection through the Team plugins. Unfortunately, I need to "import" from a Subversion repository in order to keep things up to date that way. This makes it damn impossible to use any sort of built in FTP integration inside Eclipse.

To try and get around this I've been playing with Ant (thanks Jared) and build.xml files. The hope is that I can create an Autobuild file that will upload a file any time it's created or changed (I'm not ambitious enough yet to tackle file deletions, bear with me here). Unfortunately, the only thing I've (that means Jared) been able to find is the "depends" attribute of the <target> tag. Unfortunately, this also doesn't seem to work worth a damn... It always uploads the entire project any time a single file changes. The depends attribute isn't checking to see whether anything is newer or not.

The most frustrating part of all of this is trying to find good documentation on complex processes. I've spent several hours on google digging through blog posts, forums, Ant documentation and trying to download jar files, write build scripts, and rebuild workspaces, and nothing seems to work as you'd expect. It seems you need to have a greybeard Java developer looking over your shoulder in order to use Ant, or make it do anything you really want it to.

Can someone prove me wrong, and help me figure out how I can make Eclipse just upload a file when I save it? Is that so much to ask? Please???

5 comments | Posted by Daniel Short on Oct 29, 2006 at 12:00 AM | Categories: ColdFusion - Dreamweaver - Rambling -

Considering "the switch"

As part of my new job, I got myself a MacBook pro and have been running Bootcamp on it over the last few days. All in all the experience is good, but there are issues with Windows running on the MacBook that bother me (bad sound drivers, and the fact that the clock resets on each startup). However, before I installed BootCamp I spent quite a bit of time on the Mac and got over some of my "floating windows" phobias. To that end, I'm considering going all the way and switching to OSX. So to get to my point, is there anyone out there that's recently been through this that can give me some pointers on what I might miss?

My biggest concern is not finding a worthy replacement for Beyond Compare. I absolutely love the program, and haven't been able to find anything comparable on the Mac. I've seen other diff tools, but nothing with the feature set that Beyond Compare has (saved sessions, full folder tree synchronizations, folder tree comparison reports, exlucsions, rule sets, etc. etc.). Any suggestions in this area would be fantastic, because honestly, the lack of a good Mac file diff tool would keep me on the PC for good...

17 comments | Posted by Daniel Short on Jun 6, 2006 at 12:00 AM | Categories: ColdFusion - CSS - Dreamweaver - Newsgroup - Rambling - VBScript -