Skip to main content

Auto Insertion of Tag attributes and Function arguments in ColdFusion Builder 2

The Editor is the most important feature in an IDE and the code assist features in the Editor helps in developing applications quickly and hence help in increasing the productivity. One of features is the 'auto insertion of tag attributes'. Most of the tags in ColdFusion have a mandatory attribute, for example the attribute 'name' is mandatory when using the cffunction tag. In ColdFusion Builder 2, these attributes are auto inserted i.e. when a user types in the cffunction tag and invokes code assist (using CTRL + SPACE) the name attribute is auto inserted.

auto insertion also works for function arguments wherein the required arguments are auto inserted.

Auto Insertion of Tag attributes

As explained above, the mandatory attributes are auto inserted whenever the code assist is invoked for tags such as cffunction:


In the above picture, code assist for cffunction is invoked and the tag is selected from the list. This would auto insert the required attribute 'name':


There are some tags such as cfpdf, cfimage wherein a few attributes become mandatory when one of the attributes' value is specified. For example, in case of cfimage when the action attribute is specified as 'convert', the attributes destination and source become mandatory and are auto inserted:


Now on selecting the action attributes' value as convert, the attributes destination and source are auto inserted:


If the user selects action attributes' value as rotate, then the attributes angle and source are auto inserted:


Another thing to note here is that, after inserting the required attributes the cursor is positioned such that one can go about specifying the next attributes' value.

auto Insertion of required function arguments

Whenever one tries to invoke a built-in function or a user defined function the required arguments are auto inserted. For example, consider a function foo which takes three arguments, of which the first two arguments are mandatory:

When this function is invoked using code assist, the required arguments are auto inserted. As seen above, arguments arg1 and arg2 are marked as required and are auto inserted when the function is invoked. After inserting the required arguments the first argument is selected so that the user can go about specifying a value for the argument. The tooltip here shows the list of arguments that the function accepts along with the argument type. The last argument - arg3 is marked optional and is surrounded by square brackets indicating that it is optional. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Custom validation messages for HTML5 Input elements using the constraint validation API

HTML5 has introduced several input types such as EMAIL, URL, RANGE, SEARCH, DATE, TIME, etc,. Most of the modern browsers have implemented them and are ready to be used in a HTML document. Another exciting feature introduced in HTML5 is the form validation. Instead of writing JavaScript to validate users input, browsers can now validate it and show an appropriate message if the validation fails. The validation message is shown in line with the field for which the validation has failed. The default error message is shown when the validation fails. In this post I'll explain how these error messages can be changed.
12 comments
Read more

De-obfuscating javascript code in Chrome Developer Tools

I had blogged about JavaScript debugging with Chrome Developer Tools some time back, wherein I have explained how these developer tools can help in debugging javascript code. Today Google Chrome 12 was released and my Chrome browser was updated to this version. As with every release, there have been some improvements made on performance, usability etc,. One feature that stood out for me is the ability to De-obfuscate the javascript code.

What is Minification?

Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters such as white spaces, comments, new lines from the source code. These otherwise would be added to make the code more readable. Minifying the source code helps in reducing the file size and thereby reducing the time taken to download the file. This is the reason why most of the popular javascript libraries such as jQuery are minified. A minified jQuery file is of 31 KB in size where as an uncompressed one is about 229 KB. Unfortunately, debugging minified javascript file…
15 comments
Read more

Adding beforeRender and afterRender functions to a Backbone View

I was working on a Backbone application that updated the DOM when a response was received from the server. In a Backbone View, the initialize method would perform some operations and then call the render method to update the view. This worked fine, however there was scenario where in I wanted to perform some tasks before and after rendering the view. This can be considered as firing an event before and after the function had completed its execution. I found a very simple way to do this with Underscore's wrap method.
2 comments
Read more