Never Miss Another ColdFusion Hotfix

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Never Miss Another ColdFusion Hotfix

View the latest ColdFusion Hotfix notifications from your ColdFusion Administrator using a custom extension. Download this zip file, and extract the extensionscustom.cfm to the /CFIDE/Administrator/ directory.

The next time you view the Administrator you'll see a new menu item in the left-hand navigation panel called "Custom Extensions". When the new Custom Extension menu is expanded, you'll see a list of the most recent hotfixes available for your ColdFusion server.

The full hotfix article title is truncated to display well in the menu, but when you mouse over you'll see the full title. Click on a link to view the full hotfix article in the main ColdFusion Administrator window.

Got BlogCFC? The code makes great blog pod, too. Just slap it into a new, empty blog pod between the module tags and add line in layout.cfm.

Use the Custom Extensions menu to view the most recent ColdFusion Hotfixes View ColdFusion Hotfixes from the ColdFusion Administrator

posted on 11 January, 2007 at 7:06 PM.
ColdFusion | Comments (14)

Comments

Fancy

comment by Rob Gonda, posted at 1/11/07 10:12 PM

Great idea! Thanks Steven.

But I think there would be some official solutions such as "Windows Update". :)

comment by O?uz Demirkap?, posted at 1/12/07 1:34 AM

Thanks Steven!

comment by John Barrett, posted at 1/12/07 3:29 AM

Nice one mate.

ta

comment by Critter, posted at 1/12/07 8:07 AM

Thanks!

I agree that a formal hotfix notification system would be a great enhancement.

This is just an interim solution I cooked up, but still I think I'll beef it up a bit when I get a free moment.

Perhaps when Custom Extensions is expanded the versions of CF would appear in the menu. Then when clicked on, the list of hotfixes for that version would appear in the main window with the longer description and full title.

I think I might be able to perform some check to determine which hotfixes may already be installed and provide a color code indicator to distinguish installed vs. not installed.

I could also include a link to directly download the hotfix zip file, although I would prefer to only link to the technote for the hotfix since it includes important information and installation instructions.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 1/12/07 11:01 AM

Steven,

That's great. I am going to put that on my blog.

In the long term perhaps it could be used to create a new page in the administrator which could be used to download new hotfixes and install them as a single click (or two).

Kevin

comment by Kevin Roche, posted at 1/12/07 11:30 AM

I did a little playing around with this this morning, and made a few changes (contact me if you would like me to email a copy).

I added an attempt to check if the hotfix has been installed (works for those with a link to something hf#####.jar, not for updates to thinks like the web server connector) which displays its link in green and shows the update.gif (from the cfadmin images), or red text with the alert image if the hotfix was not applied (or is not of file name hf#####.jar). I also changed it to display the article number instead of the first n characters of the article title, as we refer to them by number internally and the link alt already shows the title

comment by Rich Rein, posted at 1/12/07 11:37 AM

Rich, sounds like we're thinking alike about checking available fixes against installed fixes. For standard hotfixes this gets complicated quickly because most hotfixes can be found in the classpath programmatically, but there are 'unusual' hotfixes such as a newer connector version which are harder to check against the technote.

After some discussion, I realized that it would be equally important to have the Security Bulletins available, and the cumulative updaters as well. They are not available in XML format from adobe.com, so a site-dependent HTML parser would have to be written.

Further, it might be better to have the ColdFusion Admin HF notification custom extension load fast and then have an asynchronous AJAX widget connect to another custom extension page which does the HTTP call and the parsing. This way the initial page loads fast and gets updated afterwards.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 1/12/07 11:52 AM

Just FYI, this extension is not working at the moment. Adobe.com was not compressing the generated XML output in the HTTP Response when I wrote this, but over the weekend the response started being sent in compressed format (X-Adobe-Zip). I tried using the CFHTTP workaround for IIS compressed responses, but it didn't work, perhaps because Adobe.com is served by JRun webserver proxied behind Apache.

Also, the hotfix XML format was not an RSS feed, but just an XML Schema specific to the software used to manage Technotes (Kanisa). My custom extension parses that XML to strip out just key information to be used as a simple list of links.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 1/15/07 1:12 PM

The information to get this working again was posting in the comments on your previous post (Workaround for CFHTTP and Compressed HTTP Response from IIS - http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm/2004/7/2...). I added only the "Accept-Encoding" cfhttpparam header (with a value of "*"), and now the extension works like a charm again.

comment by Rich Rein, posted at 1/16/07 5:36 PM

Great call Rich! Thanks for the tip. I've updated the download with this fix.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 1/16/07 6:47 PM

I get: can't find the server at d65app-vip.macromedia.com.

comment by Gary Funk, posted at 1/21/07 6:32 PM

Any chance of getting the hotfix info on a URL without a port number? It would be great to have this plugged in the server, but the URL gets blocked because of the port number.

comment by Stephen Moretti, posted at 2/12/07 6:50 AM

Steven,

The page stopped working. I tried to see what is going wrong here and it seems that adding dumpxml to the adbe url no longer creates xml. It just gets ignored. Is there anyone you can ask to see if there is a way to fix it?

comment by Kevin Roche, posted at 7/6/07 4:21 AM

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I live west of Boston and work as a Software Engineer with ColdFusion and Flex, specializing in Linux. Recently I graduated in Professional Digital Photography from CDIA.