Charlie Arehart

Have you ever wished CFINPUT provided a way to validate an e-mail address? Or were you frustrated that its telephone validation didn't allow parentheses around an area code among other such limitations? Well, your wish has been granted in a new, little-known feature of CF5. While many will know of the top 10 or so new features in CF5, few will know about the dozens (yes, dozens) of less-promoted enhancements. One of these is the ability to validate user input by way of regular expressions. (If you're new to regular expressions, we'll show you some examples and point you to the CF... (more)

Getting Focus()ed and a Quick JavaScript Lesson

Many new J2EE developers get caught up in focusing on the details and nuances of servlets and JSPs and, as a result, may not learn how to leverage JavaScript. Some may even dismiss it as too much hassle, given cross-browser compatibility issues. For both audiences there's still value in learning at least a minimal amount about client-side scripting. Even learning about just one feature - ... (more)

Testing Against Many Values in a CFIF

If you have to test a condition against many values in a CFIF, you may be tempted to write out a very long condition, such as: CFIF FORM.STATE IS "MA" OR FORM.STATE IS "VT" FORM.STATE IS "AK" ... This quickly becomes unwieldy. There is an alternative approach. Simply use the LISTFIND (or LISTFINDNOCASE) function instead, as in: CFIF LISTFIND("MA,VT,AK",FORM.STATE) Note that the list of val... (more)

Saving Files Where Expected in Studio

Studio has an interesting (and to some, annoying) mechanism for determining where to save newly created files. If you're not aware of this approach, you can be left feeling that Studio has made a mistake in deciding where to save a file—if you even notice it's not where you had expected. The mechanism is controlled by the location pointed to in the "local files" tab in Studio's Resource T... (more)