Sometimes in Coldfusion development its handy to use coldfusions standard functions such as CFfile or CFdirectory. But you can also invoke the underlying Java objects that share similar functionality. These can often be more efficient too, as there is no coldfusion server compilation layer involved.

For one piece of work I had recently I was reading a series of files, parsing them out and inserting a the collection of records into a database.

So I created used a java file reader object to read the files.

There is the odd extra config line in here, as the server pathing is unix based not windows based, and I'm dynamically reading the files from the directory.

Next I use the file name variable in the java FileReader object call. I wrap the file reader in a BufferedReader object as this greatly reduces the operation overhead of the FileReader object as the data is buffered into memory and not read from the disk.

Next I'll loop over the outptut string from the buffered file reader object, parsing each line and invoking the cfc method of 'processContent', passing in the string (line of data) as the argument 'content'. '

Now you can perform any sort of parsing you want to perform on the content. In the example below I am creating a local structure and populating it with each delimited value. This allows me to use standard notation to pick out individual elements for whatever processing you want.

I have had a need in the past to list directory contents, and filter on the extension type within that directory.

You can do this using cfdirectory, but you can also use cfexecute to run a batch file, which in my experience is a quicker solution than having coldfusion reading large directories.

Create a batch file like this:

"\yourdir\*.*" is optional you can filter this by file type by adding a file extension. EG \ or \*.log or \logs\*.*

"dir.txt" is the filename you want the listing to be stored in, choice of name/location is up to you. You can write it out to any directory that the server has permissions on.

eg mylogs.dat or \mylogs\list.txt

I was recently writing a service to consume an xml feed, and I stumbled upon an issue that I had previously not seen with the cfhttp tag. These days I would usually opt for a cfc call to a webservice, and consume it as a 'true' service object, but this is an old school http request, as I am reading asp page content. I setup the standard cfhttp code in coldfusion.

Unfortunately the http response was "Connection Failure". After investigating various potential authentication issues from both the destination server and the source server I had hit a wall. I fired up 'HTTP debugger' and had a scan of the http responses to see if anything stood out, and discovered that the http response was actually '200' which signifies everything is ok. So I was actually receiving a valid response. Maybe the problem was coldfusion. It transpires that if CF receives compressed or encrypted http responses you have to tell it what to do with them manually.

By adding these headers to the cfhttp you are requesting that the server return uncompressed responses, allowing coldfusion to handle the data returned. I ended out piecing this together from several different sources, but this site (http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm/2004/7/28/20040729) has a very good blog entry on this as well. So thanks Steven Erat, you helped a ton there!

Complete code:

Now on to why I was actually writing this cfhttp request in the first place, http://www.360voice.com/, where you can hook up your XBox 360 to a web data feed.

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