We're not sure that these Actions will be of much use to anyone if they don't understand ColdFusion and/or SQL. An excellent book about ColdFusion is Programming ColdFusion by Rob Brooks-Bilson and published by O'Reilly.

We have been told that some CF tags should be put at the top of the page, including CFMail and CFQuery. We have not implemented this in these Actions, as we were (mostly) able to get the functionality desired without doing so. Also, since the CFMail Action is generally applied to an object like an HTML box, we were concerned about trying to relocate the code in the box generated by Freeway.

For more information about each CF Action, consult your CF documentation. We have tried to make each Action able to include the complete functionality of the corresponding CF tag, but some features were only tested on a preliminary basis. As always, if you use these Actions, we welcome your feedback.

We have created a Read Me file for your convenience. It includes most of the same text that each of the CF Actions has here.

Download the Read Me for CF Actions

This is the key to most of the functionality, the ability to run a query on a database. The SQL inserted in the Action is where all the work is done. Giving the query a name allows the data returned to be referenced elsewhere on the page, such as in the CFOutput tag, as well as allowing multiple queries to be run on the same page, perhaps even having one query referencing a previous query.

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This Action, along with CFQuery, does the bulk of the work. Simply put, CFQuery gets the data, CFOutput shows it. CFOutput will conveniently loop through the results of the query when you use one. The Action is set up so that it can be applied to an HTML box, a table cell, a table row, or an entire table (the pop-up is necessary because an action can only be placed in a cell within a table).

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Put this on your Action page on an HTML block that will be the body of the message. Uses ColdFusion to send an e-mail that can be based on fields in a form. If you use a form, field names in form must match those input in the palette. It supports both plain text and HTML mail, but there were problems getting it to work properly with the server we were using. Allowing it to 'move' to the top of the page may fix the problem, but we worked around it.

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Another way to output data in CF is with a CFLoop tag.

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CF allows file management via this tag. We would advise anyone using CF to be careful with this tag, as it could be easily abused. It seems to allow access to the file system of the entire server. Maybe not, but who would want want to try. We're particularly proud of the Action interface on this one.

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This action doesn't correspond directly to a CF tag; rather, it builds a pop-up menu where CF can mark the appropriate item as selected. You would use this where you want all of the choices available in the pop-up; if you only wanted to select from the choices being used, it's easier to do that another way in CF.

Bug Alert - This Action exposed a weird bug, possibly in Freeway or maybe the Action's code. If values were entered into all 20 fields, the Action would time out, getting stuck in a loop. Backing down to 19 fields, it worked fine. Adding a 21st field and using 20 of them also worked fine.

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Sets the value of a CF variable.

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This one never really was used; instead it was much simpler to add a markup item where a CFIf, CFElse, and /CFIf was needed, since it was usually necessary to "wrap" text within an HTML box or in a table cell with the conditional.

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