ColdFusion: Calculating Yesterday’s Date bypassing weekends.

I was working on a project, and I needed to write a new function which calculates yesterday’s date and if yesterday was a Sunday, the function needed to return last Friday’s date.  The first part of my function checks to see if the date supplied to the function is at least Tuesday.   If the date passes that check, then we subtract one from the date and return the date.

If the date failed the first check,  then we subtract 7 from the date to get a day last week, and then subtract the day of the week from that day in order to get to the beginning of the week.   Finally we add 6 to that day in order to get Friday.

[cffunction name="getLastWorkDay" returntype="numeric" access="private"]
     [cfargument required="true" type="date" name="DateToProcess"]
     [cfif DayOfWeek(fix(arguments.DateToProcess)) GT 2 ]
          [cfreturn CreateDate(Year(arguments.DateToProcess),Month(arguments.DateToProcess),Day(arguments.DateToProcess-1)) /]
     [cfelse]
          [cfreturn DateFormat((Fix(arguments.DateToProcess)-7) - DayOfWeek(Fix(arguments.DateToProcess)-7)+6)/]
     [/cfif]
[/cffunction]
[cfoutput]Date: #DateFormat(getLastWorkDay(now()), "dddd, mmmm d, yyyy")#[/cfoutput]

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(ColdFusion) Formatting the day of the month to ready 1st, 2nd, or 3rd

A simple solution to formatting the Day of the month to have the suffix “st,” “nd,” “rd,” or “th,” is to create an 31 element array, and initialize the array with the appropriate values.

<cfset DateSuffix=["st", "nd", "rd", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "st", "nd", "rd", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "st"]>
When display the day of the month using the following code:

<cfoutput>#DateFormat(now(),'d')##DateSuffix[DateFormat(now(),'d')]#</cfoutput>


 

Simple Chat Application using ColdFusion 2016 Web Sockets

I’ve been playing around with #Coldfusion2016 ability to create a Websocket this week. In my application.cfc, I created a new websocket named “chat” and added a listener title wsChatApplication using this line of code:

this.wsChannels = [{name:”chat”, cfcListener: “wsChatApplication” }];

The listener prepends the logged in username and time to the message the user sends from the index.cfm Authentications is handled in the onWSAuthenticate function of the application.cfc

The index.cfm contains the JavaScript needed to handle the messages back and forth to the server’s websocket.

Using Coldfusion 2016 to provide a Web Service from a list in SharePoint 2013.

A few months ago, I posted a quickly written blog entry titled, “ColdFusion 2016’s cfSharePoint tag.”  I really like the idea of getting data out of SharePoint for use in other Web Applications,  Mobile Development,  Use on Web pages, etc.  In the example below,  I wrote a ColdFusion Web Service around the Out of the box Task Lists.   My web service returns the title, description, start date, end date, percentage complete, assigned, and status via the getStatus method.  The getStatus method accepts one argument, “status,” and returns all records with the provided status in XML.

Keyword Research Tool and Meta-tag Generator

I’ve been looking to keyword and meta tag research tools, and there are some good resources available such as keywordtool.io and Google Keyword Planner.  I haven’t been satisfied with the free options available.    While researching, I came upon a post where someone mentioned using the URL: http://google.com/complete/search?q=<Search Phrase>&output=toolbar.

The post got me thinking about creating a custom tool, which would allow me to generate tags based on Google’s autocomplete feature.   Other developers have written and are selling tools based on this feature.

Please comment below if you use the code in one of your projects.  I love hearing something I wrote was useful to you.

~bk

Old School Programming via Visual Basic 2015

I had the need this week to check an SQL account password on a user which was configured in a way the account couldn’t access the server via the SQL Manager.   The account password was lost years ago.  I cracked the account password from the executable from legacy application.   The code below is Visual Basic 2015 .net console app, and was written so I could log directly into the database in order to verify the password.

Fun with jQuery

I was asked to add a scrolling news feed to my work’s main SharePoint site.  I am not a fan of scrolling content because the movement is distracting if the page is left open on a second screen.

Use SharePoint Designer 2013,  I created a new HTML page in the site pages and added the following code to the page.

I am using:  jQuery 2.2.3,  jQuery.rss, jQuery Moment, and jQuery.vticker to make this work.   It’s important to allow jQuery.rss to get the feed before vTicker starts.  I used jQuery.rss “success event” to have the script wait until all the feed is loaded into the “#rss-news” div.

I used a “Page Viewer” webpart to include the page into the desired page.

~bk