Like a lot of developers, I’ve got this pet project I’m working on in whatever spare time I can find between client engagements, home maintenance, family obligations, etc. I’m using it as an opportunity to work with some of the new features of ColdFusion 9 (ORM mainly), ColdFusion Builder Beta and features in development for the next release of ModelGlue 3.
Recently, Bob Silverburg has been working on a significant overhaul of the scaffolding feature used by ModelGlue to automatically create CRUD forms for the various data objects in your application. Particularly exciting to me is that you can now override the built-in code templates with your own. Bob wrote a proof-of-concept application that uses the excellent cfUniform custom tag library to build standardized forms and validations (see my previous post on cfUniform if you’re not familiar with it). Since I’m pretty particular about how my project files are arranged, I proceeded to place the css, javascript and image assets into the folders where I wanted them and use ColdSpring to create a configuration bean to pass to cfUniform when I called it. That’s where the trouble began.
I had to make a couple of changes to the code generated in the custom scaffold CFC in order to have cfUniform see the custom configuration that I had set up. No matter what I did, when the scaffolding engine generated the code for the view and the XML fragment for the event-handler, the changes I made inside the CFC weren’t included. I spent a couple hours scratching my head, tracing the request cycle, restarting my local ColdFusion instance and always got the exact same code that was in Bob’s original example CFC. Finally, I decided to change the name of the CFC and update the associated bean configuration in ColdSpring. On the next refresh, I saw my changes reflected in the code generated by the scaffold!
With that in mind, I checked the settings on the Caching page of that instance’s CF Administrator. Sure enough, the Cache Template In Request, Component cache, and Save class files options were checked. I cleared those check boxes, pressed the Clear Template Cache Now and Clear Component Cache Now buttons below and have had no trouble since. Obviously there are situations where you want these enabled, but rarely ever should they be needed on a local system being used for development.
So, the moral of my painful story–if you’re making changes to code that’s not being reflected when you test browse your application, don’t forget to check the settings on the Caching page in CF Admin. It just might save you a couple hours and a few gray hairs.