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Building Intelligent sessions into your framework |
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Have you ever been logged into an application and had your session timeout, then when you log back in you are returned to a different place altogether?
This article deals with a way to mark where a user was in your application and return them to that location when they log back in. It also allows a user to deep link into an application. IE when they have a bookmarked link instead of being passed to the home page, they are passed through to their original destination.
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The SEO way to safely redirect a Page or folder using 301 redirects |
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In a recent project we are restructuring a site to be more intuitively architected. But what impact will moving the directories or pages have on all that hard earned Search Engine Ranking Optimisation work?
This article deals with how to safely redirect users from an old page or folder to the new URL, and keep Search Engine's informed of your changes without leading them to dead content (Dead content is bad and will adversely affect your Site rankings).
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Pre loading object (CFC) references in your Application.cfc |
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One of the best practices that I've been using more and more is ColdFusion's ability to add CFC object references to scopes. By this I mean that it is possible to create a shorter friendlier scoped variable that you use to reference your CFC's.
In your Application.cfc you can map out all your CFC references, this gives you a much shorter variable name to type each time, and it caches the CFC.
2
3<!--- scope out all the objects as application level vars --->
4<cfset application.formObj= createObject('component','dir.objName ')>
5<cfset application.siteObj= createObject('component','dir.objName')>
6<cfset application.mailObj= createObject('component','dir.objName')>
7<cfset application.config=createObject('component','dir.objName').getConfig(id=N)>
8
9</cffunction>
Put any references like this in the 'onApplicationStart' function. You do not need to lock the scope in this function, and if the code within it does not run successfully then it does not continue running the application. It will try again on the next page request.
The caching functionality here is great, not only will Coldfusion create a handy short name for CFC, but it will actually run through the code, and stop on any errors. If you deliberately introduce a code error into one of your objects you will see the Application halt and show you the error. For me this is reason enough to move all my business logic into CFC's. This essentially means that it is not possible for a user to get part of the way through a application and find an object based error.
Using this in conjunction with a framework such as FuseBox allows you to load, parse and cache the CFC object, all before your actual display layer has been invoked.
The example below uses the FuseBox function 'onFuseboxApplicationStart' of starting an Application.
2 <cfset super.onFuseboxApplicationStart() />
3<!--- scope out all the objects as application level vars --->
4
5<cfset application.formObj= createObject('component','dir.objName ')>
6<cfset application.siteObj= createObject('component','dir.objName')>
7<cfset application.mailObj= createObject('component','dir.objName')>
8<cfset application.config=createObject('component','dir.objName').getConfig(id=N)>
9
10
11</cffunction>
Changing the 'fusebox_parameters.mode' value allows you to set this caching at an environmental level, so no caching for development, or caching for live
2Or
3<cfset FUSEBOX_PARAMETERS.mode = "production">
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Tracking single page sites with Google analytics code |
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If you have a framework that controls the URL in some way then you may have an issue when it comes to Google Analytics tracking. In this blog entry I will examine how to alter your GA tracking so that you can specify custom URL values to track. I will then apply this to a FuseBox framework.
Traditionally Google Analytics code tracks each page impression by capturing the URL and all values of the Query string, storing it in a cookie and sending it back to the Google search engine through a JavaScript call. When all your site / applications pages are "index.cfm" it may prove difficult to generate useful Analytics information.
In this example I am using a FuseBox framework. If you are unfamiliar with this, the premise is that all the templates use "index.cfm" and then pass through two parameters. The first is the component to use as a controller (we will use public.cfc) and the second value is the function name to call within that controller. So our URL may look like this:
