Wish all our CFB blog visitors a very happy, healthy and prosperous new year!
As the first post in 2011, let me point you all to some very interesting and helpful videos related to project creation, server configuration and debugging. Here they are : CFBuilder Movies. These have been prepared by one of our LR experts Anand. More on editor features coming soon!
This post is majorly a result of our session in CFUnited. CFBuilder has so many small things that it isn’t really possible to document everything and so this is one of things you might miss.
So, what’s with this flashy term “Link folder”.
The dictionary meaning says “A folder that is linked to something”.
The Link folders in ColdFusion Builder are folders (folders/directories containing any resources) which are linked to the project.
When and where would a user ideally use this:
Charlie is writing ColdFusion applications for various clients. He has a cleaner approach of working and so he creates Projects in location different from web root/document root[ For e.g. C:\ColdFusion9\wwwroot or C:\Intepub\wwwroot ].
Say for client 1 all his projects are in C:\Client1 so on and so forth. However in order to preview and debug files his source files have to be in the document root(Its mandatory!)
So while creating a Project he will create the Project, say “Project_MI” for Client, say “XYZ” in C:\XYZ\Project_MI\ and he will link the source folder say C:\ColdFusion9\wwwroot\Project_MI in this Project. This way his purpose is served.
To do this, while creating a project go to the 3rd Panel in the Project Creation Wizard and enter details. Refer to the image below.
In case you have forgotten to do it while creating a project you can still do it by Right Click on Project -> Properties -> ColdFusion Project -> Additional Source Section
Screen shot below:
The folders that you link with your project could contain anything that the project needs. Physically these resources will still be at their own location but virtually they are associated with your project. Your link folders could be folders containing CFCs or image folders.
Shoot your Questions if any…
You will see a small icon at the top toolbar which looks like this : 
This icon is the “Open CFC” icon. Clicking this icon will list all the CFCs opened in the navigator view. Lets say you have n no of projects opened in the navigator and you want to quickly refer to a method in one of the CFCs. Instead of finding the project and then searching for the CFC from so many in the Project, just click this icon and the list of open CFCs will be available.
Not just that, all these CFCs are listed with their fully qualified names making it easier for you to choose.
Good things indeed come in small packages… 
I am sure most of you must be aware but still wanted to pen this one down.
This one’s specifically for converting your non-CF or non-CFBuilder Project into a CF Project.
If you wish to work on your existing projects in CF Builder, i.e. the projects that were created using any other IDE, then these projects will not open as CF Projects. They will be generic projects. Which means you need to convert them to CF Projects in order to use all the features(Editor features/Preview/Debug/Extensions etc) of CFBuilder.
This can be done in two ways:
1. Import Project: You can import the existing project that you wish to work on. When you are on the Import Project Wizard, enable the “Show All Projects” checkbox.
This will enable the “Apply CF Nature…” optoin. Select that one as well.
Now your project is ready to get imported as CF project.
2. You have a project in the workspace already on which you were working prior to using CF Builder(or you imported one w/o applying CF nature) and now you want to continue working on it. For converting this Project into a CF Project right click on the Project and “Apply CF Nature”.
This should also convert your project to a CF Project.
Simple and Handy!
P.S.: To identify that a Project in the workspace is a CF Project just check if the folder icon has a CF on it, like this 
3 things are necessary here:
1. It is necessary that the file you want to preview is in webroot.
2. It is necessary that the file is a part of a project in CFBuilder.
3. It is necessary that a server is associated with this project.
Considering these conditions the three steps should be as simple as:
1. Create/Import a Project in CFBuilder and create a cfm/cfc in it.
2. Associate that server with this Project, whose webroot will contain your file to be previewed**
3. Move to the Firefox/IE tab from the Source tab to internally preview this file. Else right-click on the editor and say Run As -> ColdFusion Application to open it in external browser.
**Checkpoint: A checkpoint for preview to be successful is that when you associate a server with a project the ‘Sample URL’ field below it shows the url for the project correctly.
The same checkpoint also holds good when you want to debug. You will see me re-iterating this in my post on Debugging.
Note: Though the F12 like shortcut key is not available to preview a file, there is a small button(green arrow) at the top in the tool bar. Clicking this button will run the currently opened cfm.
