Announcing ColdFusion updates released Oct 15 2024: enhancements and fixes
An update for ColdFusion has been released yesterday for both cf2023 (as update 11) and cf2021 (as update 17). In brief, the update has no security fixes, but it does fix dozens of issues that folks have stumbled over recently. It also upgrades some "OEM" libraries underlying CF, and it offers some modest enhancements.
Also, if you may be skipping to this update from prior to CF2023 update 7 or earlier, or CF2021 update 13 or earlier, please don't apply the update before reading below my discussion about possible breaking changes introduced in those updates from March and June of this year.
For more details, read on.
Without Update 17 Installed
<tr><td><a href=""></a></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td><a href=""></a></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
With Update 17 Installed
<tr>
<td>
<a href=""></a>
</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<a href=""></a>
</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
Anyone else seeing this sort of behavior?
And Blaine, as for your discussion of whitespace mgt, can you clarify things better. Your first line of HTML shows NO whitespace at all and your second set of HTML shows it nicely formatted...but the CF whitespace mgt feature has nothing to do with reformatting html at all.
But look at your comment as it was rendered here: perhaps you meant to have things appear differently, to make your point.
A more typical example would be if you had code like this:
<cfoutput>on #server.coldfusion.productversion# at #datetimeformat(now())#</cfoutput>
<cfoutput>
<table>
</table>
</cfoutput>
With CF's whitespace mgt feature enabled, the table tag would appear on line 2 of the resulting page (with the space of the second cfoutput being removed), while with it off it would appear on line 3 and a blank line would appear where that second cfoutput had been.
Or as another example, if there was a CFML comment on line 1, with whitespace mgt DISABLED there would be a blank line for that line 1 (where the CFML comment was)--whereas if whitespace mgt is ENABLED then that blank line would be removed by CF on the output.
Finally, I will say I see that same behavior whether it's CF2023 update 11 or 9, for example. So let's hear more about what you feel you are observing. :-)
coldfusion.tagext.document.DocumentSectionTag not found by pdf [139]
The error makes no sense as it does not seem related to HTMLTOPDF but apparently something in that cache does. We just had to clear that felix-cache and restart and it went away. Hopefully saves someone time. Appreciate these updates and things to watch for.
So in fact, I'm leaning toward just recommending people ALWAYS clear the felix-cache after any CF update (stop CF, delete that folder, and start CF), just in case there could be other such undocumented cases where something would be fixed by doing it. I can't see any negative consequences, nor have I heard of anyone proposing any.
Thanks also for the kind regards.
I have update Coldfusion 2021 from update 16 to update 18. The update went smooth with no issues reported when i tested it. But the application was not working and I realised it was due to the felix-cache. As mentioned in update 17 i stopped the CF server cleared the cache and it worked in te beginning but then again it was behaving weird after sometime with weird errors getting logged into logs. When i tried to check those errors from the logs i realised that the application pages were updated. So I was a little stressed and wanted to confirm if it is normal since Adobe has not mentioned that this could be the case. And weirdly after sometime all the issues were resolved and the application is back to normal again.
Can you please confirm if this is ok the source code pages getting updated as this is the first time i have encountered something like this.
Thanks a lot for your help!!
In fact I'll go so far as to say it's not possible: whatever changes you saw in your code were NOT done by the CF update process. There's zero connection between the two. I realize that will fly in the face of what you clearly believe did happen. I can't really say anything more--though I do still want to help you. More in a moment.
While you may want to elaborate and discuss things further here, I think that a lot of back and forth on this could be frustrating for everyone subscribed to these comments--especially when your issue has to do with you moving to update 18 and this post was about update 17.
(Yes, I realize you're making the point that in going to 18, you "skipped" 17 and things discussed here do "apply". And all the more in the case with this Oct 2024 update, as it was a bug fix update (about 1 in 5 CF updates are of this sort), and those tend to have more significant potential "issues".)
Anyway, rather than reply here, please send me an email at [email protected]. If we discover something amazing to share with everyone, we could add a comment here to that effect later--and of course a new blog post, as what you assert would indeed be "amazing" news if true. But again let's sort it out privately rather than here.
Hope that's helpful. I appreciate you were wanting to help others here, as well.