Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

This is a bit of esoterica, but as I've seen some searching for a solution in various help forums, I figured I'd share it here. It can be especially useful if you've been using the Microsoft LogParser command-line tool, which allows you to use SQL statements from the command line to analyze log files of all sorts. You may build up a large set of them during a session, and wish you could save them off before closing the command prompt window.

Quick Answer:

(Update) And in PowerShell, use:

Explanation

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Note: This blog post is from 2010. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Or same with if you've set the request to timeout using an alerting feature in a CF monitor like CF Enterprise server monitor, FusionReactor, or SeeFusion.

And perhaps you've seen this error from ColdFusion, in your logs or on-screen:

Do you know what this means? It's usually not what you think, and it may appear as I said 3 hours after a request was "supposed to timeout" in 60 seconds. I've even seen experienced CF developers who get thrown by this challenge. It's not new (and for those reading this even in the CF2016 era, it still happens). And it's not so much a "bug" (in either CF or the monitor tools) but just a situation that you need to understand, and there can be some ways to resolve things.

In this entry I'll try to help explain this surprisingly common problem and I hope to correct some equally common misconceptions. I'll even contend that the info in this error message is often useless and indeed misleading (and therefore the feature producing it ought not be relied upon completely, and should perhaps even be turned off for many). More important, again, there may be a way to "really" kill such a long-running request. Along the way, I'll share some things that I've not seen documented elsewhere.

I also share a solution that may work for query processing but it's NOT about a tag attribute but rather a CF Admin setting in the datasource "advanced settings" to set a "query timeout". This was added in CF 9, but many never noticed. If that's your problem and you want to skip to more on that here, feel free. but you may want to come back and read the rest as it is STILL not a perfect solution.

Strap on your seatbelts. We're going for a bit of a ride (if this situation was easy to understood in the length of a tweet, then perhaps everyone would already understand it and not find it challenging!) As always, I welcome feedback.

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Note: This blog post is from 2007. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

But what if you want to test some code in a single directory against one or more editions? Is that possible? I mean, let's say you have CF7 setup against IIS, and your code is in the c:\inetpub\wwwroot? And you've installed CF 8 for testing using its built-in web server, which runs on port 8500 (or whatever you chose) and finds its code in, for instance, c:\coldfusion8\wwwroot.

How would you have CF8 look at the code you've long had running in the IIS root? (or Apache, or a virtual directory you've setup for use by either external web server). Do you have to move the code around among these directories to test it on different versions of CF? No, you don't.

The trick is in the jrun-web.xml, which you can find in cfusionmx_home]\wwwroot\WEB-INF\jrun-web.xml . You can add a new "virtual-mapping" entry there, naming a new "alias" which points to files outside the normal CF-based wwwroot:

So now a request for http://localhost:8500/inet/ will look instead in the inetpub/wwwroot, or wherever you point it.

Update: Note that when you use the resource-path, it's case-sensitive, even on Windows, so http://localhost:8500/INET/ would not be the same.

Of course, this works also if you set up CF8 to run via your built-in web server, but setup CF 7 or 6 to run on its own built-in web server. And of course, if you're savvy enough you may figure out how to run things so that you can run all 3 using an external web server.

There are a couple of potential challenges with this technique. For one thing, if your code has hard-coded references (such as hyperlinks, images, CFLOCATIONS, etc.) to either run on a particular host (without the port) or at a particular root-relative path, then this introduction of a new port or the /inet/ alias may hamper it working. That's not a "CF" problem but rather a coding one. Your stuck then.

But it certainly works well for testing individual files. I do it all the time and have for years. Indeed, I'll share, for the sake of posterity, that this modifying of the jrun-web.xml is something I first wrote about back in 2002, but many may have missed when such info was being shared.

I'm going to go back and reprise a lot of those "oldies but goodies", spread across a few different blogs I've had over the past several years. I think I'll call them "carehart classics".

Note: This blog post is from 2007. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

So I asked around and got an answer to my keyboard dilemma which actually is a generic windows solution. Did you know that you can get the equivalent of the right-click by using Shift-f10? Whatever you have the keyboard focus on, it will open its corresponding context menu. Very nice.

So in SQL Mgt Studio, open the database, then its tables, then select the table (all of which can be done with the keyboard), and then use shift-F10. You'll suddenly see that each context menu option shows the standard underline under the key to hit to execute that command (it's the "o" for open table).

Hope that may help others.

Note: This blog post is from 2007. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

In the first iteration of this entry, I referred to the two approaches of either providing an empty ACTION or none at all, but as the comments below show, the former violates the HTML spec. So let's stick with the notion of an empty ACTION. Same result, though.

How often have we all seen code along the lines of:

or more involved:

All this could be replaced very simply with:

The form will post back to itself. I'll offer another post that shows a unique way to take advantage of this. In any case, I hope that this observation may help some folks.

(Update: I never got around to that other entry in 2007, but see a my reply to a comment below where someone asked for more info on the idea I had in mind.

Is this reliable?

Again, a clarification over what I wrote originallyhere. As was refined in the comments below, it's a violation to have *no* ACTION, but it's perfectly legit according to the URI spec (section 4.2 at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt) to have an empty ACTION, which is interpreted as a "same-document reference. (Thanks, Christopher Bradford, for that info.) Given that, even the following cautions seem needless, but I'll leave them for any still concerned.

If you have any hesitation, because you have to support multiple browsers and you can't test all possibilities, I'll understand if you choose to pass on this. But certainly if you only need to support browsers you can test, then if it works as expected, enjoy.

If anyone reading this can offer where this is the case, I'd appreciate hearing it. If you want some simple code to test, try this:

If it shows the text within the IF, then it worked as expected.

What about query string info?

You may wonder about the earlier more involved examples that showed passing the query string, in case any had been passed to the form. No problem. This technique passes any query string along just fine. Try it yourself (add ?test=test to the form and view in the debugging info that it's still in the URL scope after submission.)