I'm sure many of you already know this, but just in case, I've been beating my head against a wall for a while to get this working. SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and the default settings do not work well with CF. I searched and FeedSquirrel found me a set of instructions for how to set it up. Unfortunately, that blog no longer seems to exist (originally from http://www.orbwave.com/cfjboss/2006/04/connecting-coldfusion-to-sql-server.html), but I've found another version of it here: http://www.fusioncube.net/?p=59

Well, MAX is coming up in just a tiny little bit now, just a tad bit over a week actually (Sept 30 - Oct 3). Ben made sure we had all of our materials in really early this year (well, from past years anyways), which was a good thing. I started out making the content for my hands on with enough time to make sure it will all work properly. The content ended up being more than 70 pages long (73 pages to be exact) for just the hand out... That's a lot of content.

My sessions are full too, unfortunately, even though it's being repeated four (4) times. There's only room for 50 seats in the hands on rooms, unlike the regular session rooms, and with more than 4000 people already attending (that's a lot by the way), I know that many people will not be able to get in.

To whet your appetite, though, in case you got in, these are the things that are going to be covered in the session:

• Basic Report with a Subreport
• Grouping and Aggregate Reports
• Adding in an Index
• Initialization, Table of Contents, and Page Reordering
• The CFReport Tag

I've been trying to get the session on the docket for MAX Europe as well, but I don't know if that will happen. I can hope, though :-D And if you are going to MAX Europe and not MAX North America, send a friendly note to the MAX organizers asking (demanding?) that my session be offered there as well. As Ben Forta put it when reading the draft for the first time: "Wow, the content is phenomenal! Honestly, this is one of the best hands-on sessions I have ever seen." (he really did say that too...)

Hope to see you there!

We found an issue right after sending the images to manufacturing with Eclipse 3.3 and the CF Extensions. Apparently somewhere between M3 and M7 they changed something internally which caused the RDS Query Viewer to not work properly. We fixed this as soon as we found it, but by then it was too late to get on the DVD's for CF8. But some of you, and I know you're out there, will be using Eclipse 3.3. So... if you download this version, you can use the Query Viewer in 3.3 as well. Follow the same install instructions as before, but the Query Viewer will now work properly again. Woohoo!

At the upcomming MAX 2007 conference I will be giving the Hands On: Advanced ColdFusion Reporting session (no link yet, sorry). And I want to make it worth anyones while who attends. The text blurb on the MAX site says:
Reporting is one of the most important features in ColdFusion, and reporting capabilities have been significantly enhanced in ColdFusion 8. This session will reveal the considerable power behind these surprisingly easy-to-use features. Creating advanced and sophisticated printable output is possible, and we'll show you how.

As this is a hands on, we'll actually be doing stuff during the session. I have several idea's of what could be done, and it's marked as Advanced so I'm assuming you know CFML and have done at least some things with ColdFusion Reporting. No offense, but neophytes need not apply. Also, this session will be all about CFReport, not about CFDocument.

So among my ideas are doing a table of contents (ie using the BeforeExport function), using CFML to let you choose where to start exporting stuff for the label wizard, and so on and so forth. But I would like to know what real world problems need to be solved. And not just stuff that Ben tells me, but stuff that you guys actually need. So here's my question (and I'm probably opening a can of worms by asking it), what are the difficult problems that you guys are having when exporting reports. Not just bugs that you are running into (I want those too, but they can't be addressed in a session), but reporting problems that you have and are having issues solving. What are the tips and tricks that I need to teach in order to make the session worth your time.

Comment away my friends, comment away.

Also, I'll see everyone at CFUnited here in a few days as well :-)

You can now download the CF8 beta from Adobe Labs.

WooHoo!

So what does this mean for reporting? Quite a lot actually. I know it's been quiet around here lately, but that's because we've been working on doing all kinds of fixes and enhancements to both the reporting engine as well as the report builder. In the beta, you'll be able to play with cool things like using CSS within a report, passing in queries to sub-reports, and page breaks. We've also spent significant time making the Report Builder more stable than it ever has been before.

Darn nifty, I'd say.

So give it a whirl! And PLEASE, if you find any issues, file a bug so that it can be looked at. I don't know about things you guys don't file (go here to file a bug). We do read every single bug report that comes in, honestly.

it's coming

I'm sure by now some of you have installed IE7 on your computer. Maybe not a lot of you, but I'm sure there's a person here and there. Somewhere along the line between IE6 SP2 and IE7, Microsoft tried to make things more secure, and in turn screwed up (in my opinion anyways). They made it so that legitimate programs, such as the ColdFusion Report Builder, could no longer do their job. What-chu-talkin-about Dean? you may ask yourself. Well, let me explain.

I'm sure that those who have IE7 installed have noticed that the preview for FlashPaper no longer works. It's a weird bug, honestly, that took me a long time to track down what was wrong. Eventually I stumbled over this article: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=813117&SiteID=1 which tells us what is wrong. Apparently an application now has to opt *into* being secure, because we all know we aren't by default. What this means for you the user, is that if you have IE7 installed we have to do a little registry magic to make things work again.

It's not really too hard, and the next version of the Report Builder will have this built into itself, but if you already have yourself in a pickle and have IE7 installed, here is how to get around the issue:

1. Open the Registry Editor (Start->Run, type in regedit.exe, hit enter)
2. Open up the HKEY_CURRENT_USER key and navigate down to Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_LOCALMACHINE_LOCKDOWN
3. In the right hand side, where you see the values, we are going to add in the report builder. We do this by right clicking in the area and choosing "New->DWORD Value".
4. Name this new value "cfreportbuilder.exe" (without the quotes, mind you)
5. Finally, double click on the new value (cfreportbuilder.exe) and change the value to 1 (we are opting in to let windows lock us down)

And that's it, now we have a functioning preview once again. Hopefully this will hep those who have the problem out. You will have to restart the Report Builder (and all instances of IE) in order for it to take affect, but that should be pretty straight forward.

For those who were interested, the demo files that I used for the MAX Advanced reporting session can be found here.

If they use a database, (not all of them do use a database) it's the cfartgallery that ships with ColdFusion 7.

I know this is not reporting related, but I think it's pretty darn important.

At CFUnited this year, the CFEclipse team announced their beta version 1.3. It included a lot of cool new things, bug fixes, and the like. But there was a problem: it didn't work on Eclipse 3.1 (the core of FlexBuilder). And the flex builder stuff didn't work on 3.2. So you were stuck working in two different environments *again*.

Have no fear, my friends, the answer to your troubles has arrived. It was annoying me quite a bit, so I decided to do something about it (with Mark Drew's and the CFEclipse guys permission of course). Anyways, to make a long story short, CFEclipse 1.3 is now compatible with Eclipse 3.1. I sent the version to Mark and he updated the CFEclipse beta download page with the new version.

Geesh, there's like numbers, numbers flying everywhere.

So, if you're using FlexBuilder, and you know you should, and you want to use the updated CFEclipse functionality that Mark has worked so hard on, go here and download the updated version. The instructions at the bottom say that it doesn't work in 3.1, but this is no longer true.

So, for those of you who have not used CFEclipse yet, you probably should :-). Version incompatiblity is no longer an excuse!

I just got this from the official guys, so I figured I would pass it along. I will be at MAX giving a presentation called "Advanced ColdFusion Printing and Reporting", although it seems that the website coordinators don't want you to be able to find it. If you go into the session coordinator flex widgety thing, you can see it there under the Web Development track. It just doesn't show up under the normal website listing.

Fear not, however, as I am doing it twice. Once on Tuesday morning after the keynote and before lunch and once on Wednesday right after lunch (or during, depends on how you look at the schedule). Plus I will be around in general so you can ask me whatever questions you want as well (although I won't promise to answer then the way you want me to...). I'll probably be hanging around the ColdFusion team speakers (we have several) when they are doing their presentations, or whatever really looks interesting. Just look for the tall, red-haired, not-so-skinny guy.

Anyways, you can see the "official" looking thing below.