Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

I am thinking of doing a range of blog posts related to common development patterns that I have seen implemented. These are not exactly Design Patterns, but practices that I see and have implemented myself.

To kick of this series, I thought I would talk about your application's settings depending on environment. As a background I was working on a Galleon application that in development runs on Apache with MySQL and in Staging/Live it runs on IIS and MS SQL. Generally you want to keep your environments the same of course, but the main changes were simply table names, emails and URLs so all the code was fine.

One of the things that annoyed me was that before I could check in my code to SVN, I would have to change the settings.ini.cfm file, putting all the live settings in there.

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If you are heading to London on the 24th and 25th of May for the awesome Scotch on the Rocks conference you might also want to know that for the rest of the week there will be a post conference training in the Coldbox Framework.

Not only is ColdBox an awesome framework, but the training will be done by the framework's author, Luis Majano! This is a great opportunity to get up to speed and even become an expert on the framework (I have seen Luis train and this really is a fantastic opportunity!)

Not only can you sign up for this training, but after a bit of arm twisting and smooth talking, I have managed to get an awesome discount for you to sign up for this class. Just follow the following link to get your discount! http://coldbox-uk.eventbrite.com/?discount=mdUKLives

No, no need to thank me, just sign up and expand your framework knowledge!

I have been using Coldbox for a project for a few months now and like the framework. I won't get into all the features, since you can find out for yourself over at http://www.coldbox.org but one of the things that you realise once your project grows is that your handlers directory starts getting rather full of handler CFC's.

It took me a little while to see how I could package them up a little better but then I spotted a small bit of the docs that tells you how to do it, so for example, if you were calling your handler as:

     http://localhost/index.cfm?event=account.create

And you have moved your account handler to a /user folder you can now call it as a package:
http://localhost/index.cfm?event=user.account.create

Of course, this isn't ideal, so you can now add a route for it in your routes.cfm file (if you have routes turned of of course):

   addRoute(pattern="account/create",
            handler="user.register",
            action="new");

And now you can have a nice SES friendly url such as:    
http://localhost/account/create  
Hope that helps people looking for how to do this!