Freelance Web Development

I was working on a scheduled task in a shared hosting environment. Which is pretty frustrating when you don’t have access to the CF Administrator.

Googling, I found some functions that would return information about scheduled tasks via coldfusion.server.ServiceFactory. That of course would not work since shared hosting environments have that locked down.

Then I came across an old post by Ben Forte. Instead of ServiceFactory he used an undocumented task called ‘__list’. It almost worked… except that it errored out on some task attributes. I guess a mismatch in versions of CF is to blame.

So I took that undocumented call, then rebuilt the rest entirely. I basically turned the data into tab-separated-values. I haven’t gotten around to learning reFind(), etc yet so please excuse the many replace() functions. It’s very low tech, but it works.

It won’t matter if you expect extra column names than __list gives (those columns in the returned query will be [empty string]s). And it also won’t matter if __list gives more than you’ve expected (those extra columns won’t be in the returned query). In either case, there will be no errors.

<cffunction
	name="getCFScheduledTasks"
	returntype="query"
	output="no"
	hint="Returns a query of CF Scheduled tasks on the server"
>
<!---
Thanks to Ben Forte for posting the undocumented call '__list'
--->
	<cfsavecontent variable='tasks'>
	    <cfschedule action='run' task='__list'>
	</cfsavecontent>

	<!--- TRIM WHITESPACE --->
	<cfset tasks = trim(tasks)>
	<cfset tasks = replace(tasks, chr(10), '', 'all')>

	<!--- REMOVE FIRST AND LAST BRACKETS --->
	<cfset tasks = mid(tasks, 2, len(tasks)-3)>

	<!--- CHANGE THE TASK DELIMETER --->
	<cfset tasks = replace(tasks, '}}},', '}}#chr(10)#', 'all')>

	<!--- CHANGE THE COLUMN DELIMETERS --->
	<cfset tasks = replace(tasks, '={{', chr(9), 'all')>
	<cfset tasks = replace(tasks, '},', '}#chr(9)#', 'all')>

	<!--- REMOVE THE ROW TRAILING BRACKETS --->
	<cfset tasks = replace(tasks&chr(10), '}}#chr(10)#', '}#chr(10)#', 'all')>

	<!--- REMOVE THE COLUMN TRAILING BRACKETS --->
	<cfset tasks = replace(tasks, '}#chr(9)#', chr(9), 'all')>

	<!--- TASK DATA COLUMNS --->
	<cfset columns = 'task,start_date,start_time,last_run,end_time,interval,operation,url,resolveurl,request_time_out,username,password,http_port,path,proxy_server,http_proxy_port,file,disabled,paused,publish'>

	<!--- CREATE A QUERY --->
	<cfset cfScheduledTasks=QueryNew(columns)>

	<!--- LOOP OVER THE ROWS & COLUMNS, ADDING TO THE QUERY --->
	<cfloop list="#tasks#" delimiters="#chr(10)#" index="row">
		<cfset QueryAddRow(cfScheduledTasks)>
		<cfloop list="#columns#" index="column">
			<cfloop list="#row#" delimiters="#chr(9)#" index="data">
				<cfif spanExcluding(data, '=') eq column>
					<cfset QuerySetCell(cfScheduledTasks, column, replace(data, column&'={', ''))>
				</cfif>
			</cfloop>
		</cfloop>
	</cfloop>

	<!--- WWWEEEE! --->
	<cfreturn cfScheduledTasks>
</cffunction>

<cfset cfScheduledTasks = getCFScheduledTasks()>
<cfdump var='#cfScheduledTasks#'>

Ben's original code is at: http://www.forta.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/8/28/GetScheduledTasks-Function-Returns-Scheduled-Task-List

ColdFusion cffunction, scheduled tasks, shared hosting

I am very pleased to announce that my ColdFusion based compressor for TinyMCE has been adopted by Moxiecode’s for their official CF compressor.

Coldfusion Gzip Compressor 2.1.0 released

This version of the Coldfusion Gzip compressor is a complete rewrite that doesn’t require any jar file to be installed in the lib directory. The previous versions was basically written in Java and the cfm file only called the logic in this Java file. This was a major problem when the compressor was to be used on shared hosting servers since users can’t install these .jar files by themselves.

The rewrite of this compressor was done by Jules Gravinese. He will be the new maintainer for the Coldfusion compressor. So this release is also an introduction to a new team member.

We are trying to move TinyMCE from being a tightly maintained Moxiecode project to more of a community project. We recently added a new team page to the site that lists the members that are the core part of the TinyMCE community.

This is great news for shared hosting. Now you can run TinyMCE, compressed, without installing a jar file.

Many thanks to Artur Kordowski for his gzip work in Zip CFC.

You can look forward to tweaks and improvements over time!

ColdFusion, TinyMCE, TinyMCE CF GZip jar, java, shared hosting