Sandeep Paliwal’s Blog

Editor Profiles (Found under Preferences->ColdFusion->Editor Profiles) are meant to group all editor preferences under one set and save them all for future use.This allows users to create different profiles for different editor preferences and allows one click applying of all your favorite editor preference settings.

So what you can do is set individual editor preferences like colorization, keyboard shortcuts and code assist preferences etc. for a particular style of coding/editor use. Now once done, navigate to “Editor Profiles” preferences page and save them all as a set by creating a new profile. This newly created profile will save current values of all editor preferences. Following editor preferences are saved as profiles

1) ColdFusion->Editor Profiles-> Editor

2) Code Assist

3) Colors

4) Keys

5) Outline

6) Syntax checking

7) Typing

You can make any changes to editor preferences and whenever you want all your favorite settings back, all you have to do is, open editor profiles, select your previously saved profile and hit apply. This will set all editor preferences to values they had when you created this new profile. This can be very useful when you want to have different editor preferences for different kind of development needs.

ColdFusion Builder has three profiles created by default. They are

a) Default - sets all editor preferences to ColdFusion Builder defaults

b) Dreamweaver - sets all editor preferences similar to Dreamweaver (as applicable)

c) CFEclipse- sets all editor preferences similar to CFEclipse (as applicable)

An easy way to access editor preferences is through editor’s context menu, i.e. just right click on editor while editing any CFM CFC files, and select “preferences” menu option it will take you to CFML Editor’s preferences.

This also works for any editor in general, so for eg. if you are editing HTML files, “preferences” option in editor’s context menu will take you to HTMl Editor Preferences.

So if you change preferences quite often, this might be useful to you, especially if you are new to eclipse platform and find it difficult to access editor preferences through windows menu (Windows->Preferences-> …).

As I had said in my previous post that I will post a series of articles on extensions covering basics, tips and tricks etc, so here’s my first one.  This articles introduces you to ColdFusion Builder Extensions, explains what are they, what all is possible, where to find extensions etc.

First things First

What Are ColdFusion Builder Extensions?

Well in very simple words, extensions allow you to extend ColdFusion Builder by writing CFML code. Yes, that’s right CFML!!!….no java…no need to learn eclipse..just CFML code and a bit of XML. All this (CFML code and XML configuration file) can be packaged as ready to use zip file. This zip is what you can install/distribute as extension for ColdFusion Builder.

What all you can do with extensions?

Through extensions, ColdFusion Builder lets you hook into it in different ways. This means that you can tie specific CFML code to a given hook. To tell ColdFusion Builder to tie a hook to a specific CFML template you need to XML configuration file. Broadly there are two type of hooks

1) Hooks to Add Context Menus to different views inside ColdFusion Builder. Context menus are the pop-up menus which appear when you right click on a selected object/UI element etc. This can be useful to address code generation/analysis use-cases specific to a Framework or application development in general.

Context menus can be added to following views as of now

• Navigator View
• RDS Data View
• Outline View

2) Hooks for Listening to Events inside ColdFusion Builder

• Currently Project creation event is supported. This means that specific CFML code can be called whenever user creates a new project in ColdFusion Builder. This can be useful in creating default project templates, basic application code, Framework specific directory structure etc.

Are there any extensions available as of now?

Adobe ColdFusion Builder ships few extensions which can be location in <ColdFusion Builder install Dir>/extensions. These include extensions to generate basic as well as ORM  CFCs and Action script classes from database tables. Also a basic extension for Model-Glue Framework. And there quite a few exciting extensions already available on RIAForge under ColdFusion Builder Extensions category.

So go ahead and try out a few of them.

Hope this post clears your basic question about ColdFusion Builder extensions. Next post I will cover how you can add a context menu and hook it to cfm file.

Default colorization for ColdFusion Builder beta does not have background color set for comments. I guess lots of Dreamweaver users are used to having comment background colorized. Here’s a quick solution for that.

1) Open Editor Color Preferences(Window->Preferences->ColdFusion->Editor Profiles->Editor->Colors)

2) Click import and point to this colorization file

3) Click Apply. That’s it!!!…you are done.

Now, if you are wondering what this colorization file is, and are interested to know about it  then keep reading.

Colorization file is an xml file, which tells ColdFusion Builder how to colorize CFML. This can be created by exporting your current colorization settings.

Once you open this file you will see styles assigned for different CFML tokens.

For eg. <style foreground=”rgb(0,0,192)” id=”KEYWORD”/> meaning create style with id KEYWORD with assigned RGB colors.

Now this style can be applied to any category or token as below

<category name=”KEYWORD” style=”KEYWORD”/>

this means all keywords are styled with style identified with id “KEYWORD”.

So you can have your own custom style created and assigned to available token or categories.

Note:In preference UI only style options available are to change foreground colors and text style as(Bold/Italic/Underlined).

To change background color, as in case of comments, this has to be put in colorization file and imported back to apply.

Here’s how you assign background color for comments

create style for both background and foreground color

<style background=”rgb(255,255,153)” foreground=”rgb(0,0,0)” id=”WHITESPACE_COMMENT”/>
assign it to comment token as

<category name=”WHITESPACE” style=”WHITESPACE”>
<token style=”WHITESPACE_COMMENT” type=”COMMENT”/>
</category>

So if you need to change comment background color, just assign corresponding RGB value to the color you want to set in comment style and import your colorization file again.

Yes, as title suggests, Adobe ColdFusion Builder is extensible!!. It can be extended it at various levels through extensions. Extensions make it possible for users to  add support in Adobe ColdFusion Builder for different frameworks, code generation or even code analysis. I will post a series of tutorials explaining various aspects of extension development, tips and tricks, examples and everything that’s related to developing and using extensions for Adobe ColdFusion Builder.

So watch out this space for all extension goodies

The new ColdFusion IDE Adobe ColdFusion Builder beta is now available at Adobe labs. Read Introducing Adobe ColdFusion Builder Beta for getting started with ColdFusion Builder and to know more about its features.

Enjoy!!