Scorpio File I/O Enhancements

At one of the usergroup sessions this week someone asked if there was a way to get file information (size, date time, etc.) easily using a function. I said they should use <CFDIRECTORY>, but afterwards remembered that we did indeed add a new function to Scorpio called GetFileInfo() which returns a structure containing:

• canread
• canwrite
• ishidden
• lastmodified
• name
• parent
• path
• size
• type

Which makes this a good opportunity to review some of the file i/o changes coming in Scorpio.

For starters, if you have ever had to work with large text files in ColdFusion (maybe parsing a large CSV file) you'll know that doing so is very inefficient. You probably use code like this:

This is slow for two reasons. Not only does ColdFusion read the entire file into memory in a variable all at once, but also looping through the file requires treating it as a list which involves lots of parsing which can also be resource intensive.

Well, inefficient no more. In ColdFusion Scorpio you'll be able to replace the above code block with this:

This code block open the file, reads one line at a time, and closes it when done. I actually used this myself recently in a ColdFusion code snippet that had to parse a massive tab delimited file, turning each line into a query row. Replacing the old <CFFILE> <CFLOOP> with a new <CFFILE FILE=> cut down processing time from several minutes to under 10 seconds.

Oh, and although reading files line by line is the more common use case, you can also read by n characters at a time, like this:

In addition to the <CFLOOP> enhancements, we've also added lots of new file i/o functions that you can use to access and manipulate files directly. The new functions include:

• FileClose()
• FileCopy()
• FileDelete()
• FileIsEOF()
• FileMove()
• FileOpen()
• FileRead()
• FileReadBinary()
• FileReadLine()
• FileSetAccessMode()
• FileSetAttribute()
• FileSetLastModified()
• FileWrite()
• GetFileInfo()
• IsImageFile()
• IsPDFFile()