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Viewing by month: January 2007

DST changes: Use TZupdater if you can't upgrade your JVM

January 30, 2007

As mentioned in several posts lately (like this one by Damon Cooper and here by Sarge) the start and end dates for Daylight Savings Time are changing this year. This has a direct impact on ColdFusion since these timezone changes are only supported in version 1.4.2_11 or later of Sun's JVM. Adobe is recommending that you upgrade the JVM used by your ColdFusion installation as outlined in this technote.

In some cases you might be unable, or unwilling, to upgrade your JVM. Sun has also provided their TZupdater Tool for this purpose. As mentioned on their site, "this tool provides a route of updating timezone data while leaving other system configuration and dependencies unchanged."

To be clear -- as far as I can tell, Adobe has not officially endorsed the TZUpdater Tool, and Sun mentions the preferred method is to upgrade the JVM, but this at least leaves you with an option if you need it.

UPDATE: The TZUpdater Tool can only be used for version 1.4 or later of the JVM. Also, Adobe now has 3 technotes regarding the DST issue as noted here by Damon Cooper.

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Query Data Getting Truncated? Check Your Buffer

January 18, 2007

A coworker of mine ran into a problem the other day with query data he was trying to display on a page getting truncated. The database he was querying has a text column that stores huge XML documents, and he noticed one document was getting chopped off...exactly 64000 characters into the display.

By default, ColdFusion datasources are defined with a "Long Text Buffer" size of 64000 chr -- if your query data is any larger than that, the remaining characters are lost. It's important to note that no error messages are thrown when this occurs -- CF just fills the buffer to the max and continues processing.

To resolve this issue, you have two options. Under the Advanced Settings for the datasource you can either increase the size of the Long Text Buffer, or simply check the box for CLOB to "Enable long text retrieval"...

According to LiveDocs, when you have the CLOB setting selected your queries will "return the entire contents of any CLOB/Text columns in the database for this data source. If not selected, ColdFusion MX retrieves the number of characters specified in the Long Text Buffer setting."

We ultimately decided against enabling CLOB just in case there were ever super size documents in there -- we didn't want to bring the server to its knees :) Ultimately, we bumped the Long Text Buffer size to 512000 which turned out to be sufficient for most of the documents in the database.

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In Support of MachBlog

January 15, 2007

To celebrate the announcement of the public beta for MachBlog and to support the continued community efforts of Matt Woodward and Peter Farrell I've installed MachBlog on my site and this is my first post.

So what can you expect from this blog? Well -- posts about ColdFusion, Flex, and whatever else I happen to want to share :)

For more info about me, see the About page.

By the way -- if you were a big fan of my old site and you're disappointed that I took it down, you can view it here in all of its glory..

Comments (10)   |   Related Categories: ColdFusion