Justin Carter's madfellas.com

ColdExt Beta 1 with CFEclipse tag insight!

I'm fairly excited about this release because it has some really cool stuff in it :) I've already dropped the biggest bombshell in the blog post title, which is support for tag insight in CFEclipse - very nice!, but there are a bunch of other nice updates and new features as well...

Changes at a glance include;

  • 7 new tags, 3 new grid demos
  • 90%+ of the tags have been updated with inline documentation
  • EditorGridPanel provides support for editable grids (only supports input and comboBox fields at this time, more to come very soon)
  • GroupingStore and GroupingView can now be used for grouping in both GridPanel and EditorGridPanel
  • GridRowNumberer can be used as a numbered column in Grids (though it doesn't support paged grids - by design from the Ext Team)
  • New <ext:html> tag for including arbitrary chunks of HTML inside panels and forms
  • Tags which don't require a closing tag will now work as a single tag without a trailing slash (partial support)
  • Tags which require a closing tag will throw an error if the closing tag is missing (partial support)
  • Initial implementation of attribute validation in some tags (starting with the panel tags to assist with rendering issues)
  • Support for including the Ext debugging JS
  • The bundled version of CFJSON has been updated to the latest v1.9
  • CFEclipse tag insight (/dictionary/coldext.xml)


Download ColdExt Beta 1 from RIAForge

Here are the new online demos:


I will refrain from posting screenshots and code listings of the demos this time round since you can download everything you need and view the working demos above (well, that and it's getting late here in Oz and I need some sleep!) :)

One thing you need to know though is how to set up the coldext.xml file to work in CFEclipse. Just browse to the "pluginsorg.cfeclipse.cfml_1.3.1.5dictionary" directory inside CFEclipse (your CFEclipse plugin version number may vary) and insert a copy of the ColdExt "dictionarycoldext.xml" file. Then in the same location, make a backup of the "dictionaryconfig.xml" (just in case) and then open it to make the following modification, inserting a single line to include the coldext.xml file:

<version key="cf8" label="Coldfusion 8">
    <grammar location="cf8.xml" />
    <grammar location="user.xml" />
   
<grammar location="coldext.xml" />
</version>

Give CFEclipse a restart and you should now be swinging with ColdExt tag insight!

coldext-tag-insight

*Note that at this stage only the attributes for about 90% of the tags are documented, I haven't gotten around to inline help for the actual tags themselves just yet...


If you have any feedback about this release feel free to post here in the comments or make use of the features on RIAForge:

All feedback, bug submissions, feature requests and comments are much appreciated :)