I have not posted anything iSeries related in a while, so I thought I would toss up some of the little functions I have gathered from different places. If you dont work with an AS400, then dont click 'read more' and move along =)

While I don't make any claims at being a model-glue expert, I did come up with a way to run my multi-step forms in model-glue. I basically use a single 'event' entry point that has several named results, and the single entry point controller runs 'makeEventBean()' against my form bean (kept in session), and then passes the bean to the service and asks 'what is my next step?' The next named step gets fired off to the named result, and the user see's the appropriate screen in the multi-step process. I am using Transfer ORM, so inside the service you will see some use of that code. Also, I am not going to paste the display files here, this is just really to blog about the gist of my methods to handle a multi-step form. There are quite a few little code chunks here, so without further ado...

I am rocking the latest CfEclipse Beta and Eclipse 3.4.  Impressions?  Fast, I love the updated SVN dialog boxes, and everything feels nice and stable.  Only problems were Tag-Insight for CfEclipse and missing line numbers.  CJ from IRc (thanks bud!) pointed me to the fixes, so I figured I would share.

To fix the missing tag-insight:  Right click your project, and select 'Add Remove CFE Nature' (no clue what it is or does, but it fixed me right up)

To fix missing line numbers:  in your workspace, find file .metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings\org.cfeclipse.cfml.prefs and add a line with this text:    lineNumberRuler=true

Have a great weekend all!

This may not be applicable to everyone, but I like my work environment to be fairly portable and simple to work with, so in no particular order, let me share with you how I setup my Eclipse / Coldfusion development environment on Windows.

Often times when I am writing ajax or model-glue apps, something will go wrong and its difficult to see the values that are complaining. Sure, you could pass things forward to the view, catch/try, maybe set your controller to allow output and dump it from there, but this little custom tag seems to do the trick most of the time for me.

<cfset dumpMe = attributes.var />
<cfsavecontent variable=<span class='cc_value'>"debug"</span>>
   <cfdump var=<span class='cc_value'>"#dumpMe#"</span>>
</cfsavecontent>
<cffile action=<span class='cc_value'>"write"</span> file=<span class='cc_value'>"#attributes.file#"</span> output=<span class='cc_value'>"#debug#"</span>>

its called 'fileDump.cfm' in my custom tags folder, and you use it just like you would think:

<cf_filedump var=<span class='cc_value'>"#varToDump#"</span> file=<span class='cc_value'>"c:\debug.html"</span> />

Now I will get a nice file I can open up regardless of the final rendered output of my page / event, and see what the heck is going on. You can dump the entire event, or the 'this' or 'variables' scope as well, and get the whole ball of wax in a nice file that you can dig through at your leisure!