How to read ColdFusion log files directly from your app

Written on 16 October 2011, 01:41am

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CFLOG is a very useful tool for debugging. Along with CFDUMP, it is probably one most used tags in development 🙂
Logging with CFLOG is extremely simple:

<cflog file="myLogFile" text="#TimeFormat(Now(),'hh:mm:ss.l')#: log message" />

I am usually prepending the timestamp to get the milliseconds (by default, CF only logs the time down to the seconds):

"Information","web-261","10/13/11","06:03:21","APP","06:03:21.319: log message"

About the other attribute of the CFLOG: file, the CF documentation says:

Message file. Specify only the main part of the filename. For example, to log to the Testing.log file, specify “Testing”.
The file must be located in the default log directory. You cannot specify a directory path. If the file does not exist, it is created automatically, with the extension .log.

The log file is created inside the ColdFusion default log directory. You can see the content of this file using the ‘Log files’ screen of your CF Admin interface:

But what do you do when you don’t have access to the CF Admin interface? Luckily, you can still see the contents of your log file. You just have to locate the log folder contents and then output the log file contens, as the following script shows:
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Adobe Flex 4.5 Certification

Written on 13 October 2011, 03:58pm

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In the latest months I’ve been doing some research in Flex, to have better understanding of the RIA, event-driven development. Well, there was also an interest in AMF, AIR, mobile applications, and so on. And because I needed an extra motivation for that, I planned to take the Adobe Flex certification exam. Adobe Developer Connection provided a quick overview of the exam, and the Adobe official exams page shows the Adobe® Flex 4 ACE Exam (9A0-129) available (along with the older, Flex 3 version).
However, when going to Pearson VUE website (the exam provider), I found that starting today (13 Oct 2011), the no longer support the Flex 4 exam, offering as alternative the Flex 4.5 certification exam (9A0-182):
Pearson VUE: Adobe:

Adobe does not mention anything about that, they don’t provide any study guidelines, nor specific details about the exam (sections, number of questions, time allowed, etc). This lack of communication between the two entities (let’s go with that) is quite strange in my opinion.
I contacted both Adobe and Pearson VUE – and I’ll update this post as soon as I will have more details.

Update 25 Oct 2011: Pearson VUE answered me suggesting to contact Adobe for more information.