Since it had been so long since I released utility functions, I'm doing another double header today! Not that its really that hard since these two are exactly the same... but any way, continuing where yesterday's REFindAll() and REFindAllNoCase() left off, these two new functions actually return the matching values!
Its been a while since I released a utility function, so today I bring you a very closely related pair that solve a very simple problem thats missing with ColdFusion's Regular Expression functions. Given a regular expression in ColdFusion, you can find out if there is a match for that regular expression in a given string, and where it is, but you can't find out the location of ALL of the values that match the regular expression.
Ok, so one more reason to hate IE: Internet Explorer fails to hold cookies when viewing URLs that have a sub-domain with an underscore. I found this when the project I'm developing just refused to hold on to a session when viewing the site from Internet Explorer. Almost all of the server-side technology I was using was new to me, so I lost a full day trying to figure out if it was ColdFusion 9, IIS7, or the ColdFusion on Wheels framework that was breaking the sessions before I found out that the IE browsers choke on underscores. FireFox and Chrome didn't care about the underscore, but IE6 through IE8 lost their session because they couldn't hold onto the cookies for the site.
So, if you're loosing your sessions in Internet Explorer, check your URL. I'm not sure if there are other characters besides an underscore that would cause the cookie loss, but it wouldn't surprise me.
This post isn't anything new, but I felt that I should document that yet another person has wasted some of their life struggling to get CF working on an IIS7 machine. I first ran into this problem about 6 months ago when trying to install CF8 on Windows Server 2008 (64-bit), and we had so many problems doing it that the server was rolled back to Windows Server 2003 (32-bit) to get around it. Today I had to get CF9 installed on a Vista, and had to deal with the same issues all over again. Luckily the solution was simpler this time, and involved only one reinstall of CF, rather than 5 and a full wipe of an OS like last time.
Why hasn't this been fixed by now?
Oh, and for those needing a solution, I found mine at Dale Fraser's Blog.
If you've ever had to tangle with triggering hasLayout in IE6/7 then this article at www.satzansatz.de is for you. I've been working a 90 day contract to developer HTML/CSS/JS templates based on PSDs and wireframes, and I can tell you that hasLayout has become the bane of my life. Its a running joke that to debug the page you should just "apply zoom:1; liberally and see if it works". Now after reading about hasLayout in more depth, I've got some more sophisticated tricks up my sleeve.
Well, its been a little while since my last post, and I'm happy to say that things are going ok. I've lined up a 6 week contract gig that will buy me some time to find a permanent position, and I've also gotten new hosting squared away. In my last post a reader suggested Hostek for my hosting needs, and I'm happy to say that if you're reading this post, then you're doing so on their servers. The price is great, and although it took a little bit of work to get things up and running, the Hostek staff where very helpful and prompt to respond to my questions.
So, I'm still Looking For Job, but I've bought myself at least 6 weeks to do it :)
I'm Jon Hartmann and I'm a Javascript fanatic, UX/UI evangelist and former ColdFusion master. I blog about mysterious error messages, user interface design questions, and all things baffling and irksome about programming for the web.