The Harmonious Programmer

New Query Functions released

Published: 2:01 PM GMT, Friday, 1 January 2010

We've justed finished the a whole new set of functions to help with the manipulation of Query objects and their respective datasources.

The following table highlights all the current functions within the Query category available in the OpenBD (nightly build) release:

DatasourceCreate	Adds a new datasource to the system for use with any database functions. This does not persist over server restarts
DatasourceDelete	Removes the given datasource. Note, it will not remove any datasource that was registered with the underlying bluedragon.xml file
DatasourceIsValid	Checks to see if a given datasource has been previously registered using DataSourceCreate()
QueryAddColumn	Adds a new column of data to the exist query object, returning the column number
QueryAddRow	Adds the specified the number of rows to the end of the query
QueryColumnArray	Returns all the data in a query for a given column
QueryColumnList	Returns all the data in a query for a given row but as a structure
QueryDeleteColumn	Deletes the column from the query, returning the deleted column data as an array
QueryDeleteRow	Deletes the row within a query object. Modifies the original query object
QueryIsEmpty	Determines if the query has any rows
QueryNew	Creates a new query object with the columns past in of the optional types
QueryOfQueryRun	Executes a Query-of-Query against a previous SQL result sets. Function version of CFQUERY
QueryRowStruct	Returns all the data in a query for a given row but as a structure
QueryRun	Executes the given SQL query against the given datasource, optionally passing in paramters. Function version of CFQUERY
QuerySetCell	Sets the given column within a query with the value at the given row, or the last row if not specified
QuerySort	Sorts the query based on the column specified and the order criteria given. Modifies the original query object
QuotedValueList	Returns a quoted list of all the values, for a given column within the query, delimited by the value given
ToCsv	Transforms the query object into a Comma Separated Value (CSV) block
ToHtml	Transforms the query object into an HTML TABLE block
ValueList	Returns a list of all the values, for a given column within the query, delimited by the value given

These functions will greatly increase the speed and efficiency to which you can work with Query objects.

Many of the functions where available using other means. For example, QueryDeleteColumn could have been achieved by performing a query-of-queries leaving out the column you wanted to remove. This however had a huge overhead, as well as duplicating the data.

You can read more about the DataSource functions over at Alan Williamson's blog.

Thanks to Peter J Farrell for many of his suggestions.

One word. Woot! Happy New Year!

The journey has started. Let me present the official resource for CFML documentation for Open BlueDragon:

OpenBD CFML Documentation

Key features:

• JavaDoc like interface
• Produced from the raw Java code; no external XML/wiki/sites to keep in sync
• Hot links to any particular function (CreateDateTime)
• See other functions/tags that fall in that category
• Quickly discover which parameters/attributes are optional
• Real look-ahead search
• See all functions/tags with their parameters/attributes
• Hot links to the OpenBD WIKI
• User contributed comments (Moderated)

We haven't finished annotating all the functions/methods yet, but even without that, you will find this an incredibly useful resource. I have even rediscovered functions I had completely forgotton existed!

In addition, the CFML app we developed for this, is already being bundled in the nightly build in the web-app folder. So you can even run your own internal documentation, complete with your own private notes.

We are annotating functions and tags as and when we get time, and already 80% of all the functions have been completed. For me, this is 10 years too late, for that I apologise. But we are here now. Never again will the documentation not match the implementation.

This is great -- not that it's just available via the web, but it comes bundled with the engine so it is available locally. Sometimes it's hard to get documentation on something if you're not currently tethered to the internet at the moment.

I've always thought it was strange that documentation in the CFML engine world is an "after" process. This approach is prone to error either from exemption (forgotten notes) or too much time elapsed. Unless you're a code maverick and dig around the CFML engine source code, documentation is the only way for people to understand new features and actually use them. Only after they are used do people find ways to improve them.

I hope to blog more in the future about open source, licensing and the world of CFML open source which I believe is currently in a positive flux. So check back often or subscribe to my RSS feed.

We've just added a bunch of new array functions, some bringing compatibility with other engines and others suggested by Peter through discussions on the issue tracker.

  - ArrayFirst()
  - ArrayLast()
  - ArrayFind()
  - ArrayFindNoCase()
  - ArrayContains()
  - ArrayContainsNoCase()
  - ArrayGet()

and recall the OpenBD function that was always there

  - ArrayTrim()

All to be found in the nightly build.

This is where the miracles of open source shows. What Alan did not mention is that the ticket I mentioned some of these items on was only from a day ago. Now Open BlueDragon has an array function group that matches the available function group for structs. These little things are what makes a language a joy to work with. I like to call this the spit and polish functionality. Most open source CFML projects never get to this stage so kudos to the Open BlueDragon team for listening and more importantly being proactive on user suggestions.

You may have heard about the recent high profile attacks on celebrity accounts on Twitter, where by a young (enterprising?) chap simply pointed a brute force password dictionary attack to their login process. Twitter had no throttling process here to stop this from happening.

How can you protect your own CFML applications from such an easy attack?

BlueDragon introduced the CFTHROTTLE tag a number of years ago and naturally is available now in the core distribution of OpenBD. CFTHROTTLE was designed to stop repeated requests coming from a single source consuming too many resources. Developed for Blog-City.com and modelled on the (at the time) well known Apache mod_throttle module.

Huh? How did I miss this (from last January)? I definitely going to check this out for an application I have on Open BlueDragon. I'll probably do this as a Mach-II filter as we've had some problems in the past with *bad* bots hitting the login page with bad credentials.