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A while back I posted examples of using ColdFusion 8 Ajax support to power an auto-suggest control and related <CFSELECT> controls. Both examples required that the back-end CFC methods create arrays (1 dimension for the former, 2 dimensions for the latter). And I pointed out that I hoped we'd be able to tighten that syntax before we ship.

Well, we did. In the final CF8, the CFC method bound to auto-suggest can return a simple list (a string), and the CFC bound to a <CFSELECT> can return a query. This makes the code orders of magnitude simpler. I am not going to update those entries just yet (as these enhancements won't work with the public beta), but ...

The CFC method to power an auto-suggest could be simplified like this:

<cffunction name="lookupArt" access="remote" returntype="string">
    <cfargument name="search" type="any" required="false" default="">

    
    <cfset var result="">

    
    <cfquery datasource="#THIS.dsn#" name="result">
    SELECT artname
    FROM art
    WHERE UCase(artname) LIKE Ucase('#ARGUMENTS.search#%')
    ORDER BY artname
    </cfquery>

    
    <cfreturn ValueList(result.artname)>
</cffunction>

The CFC method to power a <CFSELECT> could now just return a query. And the <CFSELECT> control would then use the existing VALUE and DISPLAY attributes to specify the query columns to be used, like this:

These are great little enhancements, and I am glad the team was able to get them in just in time.

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CF 8 Ajax with CFSELECT BIND
love the new AJAX functionality in ColdFusion 8, but I am running into problems using it.

As mentioned in Ben Forta's blog you can use the BIND= attribute on a CFSELECT tag to populate the data from a CFC using AJAX.

The problem I had was that even using Ben's samples I could not get the data to populate. After alot of tinkering I finally got it to work by remove the onRequest() method from Application.cfc. Why this affects this functionality is a mystery to me. Really for the application I'm working on it's not a big problem but on other projects it could be.

My second part of the problem is that I have a cfc directory that is OUTSIDE of the application's root directory. For example:

/website_root

/components

/images

Then I map /cacfc to /components and reference my cfc's by prepending cacfc to the component IE. cacfc.database.data. This works great as I can share components among applications easily enough. But when I call the cfc with the bind attribute of the CFSELECT, ColdFusion looks for the cfc in the root directory. Here's an example:

Tracked by Scratty.com | Tracked on 1/30/08 10:41 AM

CF 8 Ajax with CFSELECT BIND
I love the new AJAX functionality in ColdFusion 8, but I am running into problems using it.

As mentioned in Ben Forta’s blog you can use the BIND= attribute on a CFSELECT tag to populate the data from a CFC using AJAX.

The problem I had was that even using Ben’s samples I could not get the data to populate. After alot of tinkering I finally got it to work by remove the onRequest() method from Application.cfc. Why this affects this functionality is a mystery to me. Really for the application I’m working on it’s not a big problem but on other projects it could be.

My second part of the problem is that I have a cfc directory that is OUTSIDE of the application’s root directory. For example:

/website_root
/components
/images

Then I map /cacfc to /components and reference my cfc’s by prepending cacfc to the component IE. cacfc.database.data. This works great as I can share components among applications easily enough. But when I call the cfc with the bind attribute of the CFSELECT, ColdFusion looks for the cfc in the root

Tracked by Scratty.com | Tracked on 4/15/09 10:46 PM

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I know this sounds elementary but make sure that your path to your grid is set correctly.
<cfajaxproxy cfc="[mypath].QuotesGrid" jsclassname="jQuotesGrid" />
how I resolved the "...not caught" issue.

# Posted By Guillermo | 10/22/09 10:53 AM

I am also having the exception thrown not caught error. I have addcfm and getGamecfc inside another folder called manager in my site root folder.
When I moved my CFC file into the server root, the feature worked fine. How can I make it work inside another directory, though?

# Posted By Mohamad | 12/5/09 3:36 PM

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