LunaticThinker.me

While working on one of my client’s projects, I’ve encountered the need of generating RANDOM strings. Since, as almost, any other language, Cold Fusion does not have any type of support for this functionality, I had to create a function of my own.

Hope you find it useful.

    function RandomString(length, chars="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST0123456789-") {
        var i = 0;
        var theString = "";
        for (i = 0; i < length; i++) {
            theString &= Mid(chars, RandRange(1, len(chars), "SHA1PRNG"), 1);
        }
        return theString;
    }

Nothing more than this little line of code:

$homeUrl = $this->url(
    'youRouteName',
    array(/* your route params */),
    array('force_canonical' => true)
);

Of course, you need to call it within a code zone where you can invoke the URL helper. What you see above, assumes that you are in a .phtml file invoked by a controller’s action.

I’ve been looking for this a few times now, until now i’ve found two interesting options.

One is creating a cffunction of your own, and using it inside a cfscript afterwards:

The other one is using a 100% cfscript approach, which can also be placed in a function of your own:

createObject("component", "cfide.adminapi.base").dump(var);

Also, starting ColdFusion 9, you can use the writeDump function.