Sandeep Paliwal’s Blog

Here are few useful editor shortcuts when using ColdFusion Builder

• Toggle between source and preview tabs

              Press Ctrl+Page Down to navigate to next tab
               (eg. from source to preview)

              Press Ctrl+Page up to navigate to previous tab
              (eg. from preview to source)

• To navigate between all open documents in editor

             Press Ctrl+F6. Keep Keys pressed and select any open file with
             arrow keys or using mouse.

            Or alternatively Press Ctrl+E to get drop down list of open files
            to select from. If this list is too big, you can just type first
            few letters of file name and the list will get filtered automatically.

• To quick select any currently open View

           Press Ctrl + F7. Keep keys pressed and select available views through
           arrow keys or using mouse.

• Quick Outline view

           Press Ctrl+O to get quick outline view for cuttently open document.

At any time you want to change these default keys, you can do this via Preferences->General->Keys preference page.

This post from me comes a little delayed than i would have liked, but all I can say is that some cool stuff for ColdFusion Builder has been keeping me busy ;).

So to get started I will cover how to add custom context menu to different views in ColdFusion Builder in this post. Supported views include

1) Project Navigator

2) Outline view

3) RDS Data View

One good way to learn how to add custom menu is to try this out on currently available extensions. For this post I will assume you have already installed Adobe CFC generator.
All you need to do is modify ide_config.xml file (Once you install an extension, config file is placed in install location/<extension name> folder.)

Once you locate ide_config.xml at extension install location, open ide_config.xml file for editing.
Now add following entry directly under <menu name=”Adobe CFC Generator”>

<action name=”hello” handlerid=”helloworld” showResponse=”yes” />

Save the file.

Navigate to Preferences->ColdFusion->Extensions page. Click on Reload Extensions button. This will make ColdFusion Builder reload the currently modified config file and reflect you current changes.

Now when you right click any table on RDS data view, this newly menu will appear under Adobe CFC generator menu.

Once you add menu you want to be able to do stuff when users clicks on it.
to achieve this, again open ide_config.xml and add following entry inside “<handlers>” node.

<handler id=”helloworld” type=”CFM” filename=”helloworld.cfm” />

Now create “helloworld.cfm” file under handlers directory, with content <cfoutput>Hello World</cfoutput>.

Reload extensions again, and this time once you click newly added menu, a dialog will come up showing response from helloworld.cfm.

That’s it you have successfully add custom menu in ColdFusion Builder and handled click event on it.

In ColdFusion Builder HTML colors can be customized through Preferences->HTML-Editors->HTML->Colors preference page.

HTML colorization affects all HTML tags in a generic way and to set color for individual tags (like Table or Form tags) is not possible.

Here is colorization file to change HTML colors similar to that of Dreamweaver. Since all Dreamweaver colorization option are not exactly mapped to HTML colorization, it tries to match Dreamweaver html colorization as much as possible.

To use this navigate to HTML color preferences and click import button. Point ColdFusion Builder to this .col file and hit apply. That’s it!!

Understanding Default colorization for HTML Tags:

By default angular Braces for HTML tags are colorized differently than tag name. Apart from these most options are straight forward, and should be easy to change through HTML Color Preferences.

Here is how you customize colorization for angular braces around html tags.

1) Select HTML->Editors->HTML->Colors in preferences
2) Expand “Punctuator” node, Select Start Tag.
3) With Start Tag entry selected expand region colorization section below.
4) Change two entries “Tag_part” and “Name_part” to color of your choice.
5) Click apply to notice changes in any currently open file with html code.

Follow similar steps for “Punctuator” End tag entry to colorize html end tag.

Understanding  region colorization:

Regions are used to further break down any known token into number of parts. For eg.  for start tag (”<table>”) you can define 3 different regions as “<” , “table” “>” and colorize them differently.
Any tag with defined region for them have a small bar in front of their entry in token section.
Attached is screen shot which shows start tag with region colorization defined for it.
Also notice small bar in front of start tag to indicate the same.

Display of whtiespace characters in ColdFusion Builder can be easily switched on/off by hitting “Ctrl+.”(Control and dot).Below screenshow shows cfm file opend in editors with whitespace characters being displayed.

Also which characters are displayed in place of whitespace characters can be customized via Preferences->HTML->Editors page. Assign any desired characters in corresponding fields inside whitespace markers group.

Check below screenshot