ColdFusion 8 Verity Collection Indexing Problem
To add to my previous post about how our ColdFusion upgrade went, one issue has not actually been resolved as I had thought. Whenever we try to index to a verity collection, we get a null pointer exception error. We did the CF8 upgrade on three machines and this problem is occurring on 2 out of 3. There is no configuration differences between one of the two servers that isn’t working and the one that is.
The two that are not working have different configurations, one being multi instance and one being single server. We have tried uninstalling and reinstalling verity using the two batch files (verity_uninstall.bat and verity_install.bat) with no success.
The error information given by CF points to the line in our code with the cfindex action=”update” . It is a query based collection. Note that on one of these two non working machines, the indexing had worked fine shortly after the upgrade but discontinued working at some point thereafter. If anyone has any advice on this, I’d love to hear from you.
Getting some SEO benefit out of client sites
Not sure if enough people read this yet for me to get a response, but…
At my company, we do lots of web sites for clients (weird right?) and we figure that we can at least get some back links from those sites and maybe get some sort of SEO benefit. What is the prevailing wisdom on this? What are the concerns with anchor text or anything else along those lines?
We had tried putting a small “site credits” flash movie in the bottom of sites, but we received no credit for the links in those presumably because its in a flash movie. What would be required to get a benefit and is it worth it if your clients are okay with it?
Opinions would be appreciated. 
Lessons learned from our ColdFusion 8 Upgrade
Tonight we took the plunge and upgraded all of our production servers to ColdFusion 8. Once it was running, all of our sites seemed good to go. A few things…
The ColdFusion 7 uninstaller crashes often or works inconsistently
On our multiserver configurations, the installers worked pretty badly overall and if they didn’t , the web based migration tool would hang. For multiserver configurations, you pretty much have to start over. In enterprise edition, the ColdFusion Admin has a tool which generates .car files which contain backups of some of the configuration. Where this tool worked, it saved time in recreating data sources and other things like that. The frustrating thing was that when we tried to create these, for the most part, no file was generated and no error was given. In those cases we had to manually recreate all of our data sources.
Verity Issues
Quick solution to a verity problem you might run into. The ColdFusion 8 installer didn’t stop the ColdFusion 7 services . When we went to recreate our verity collections, the cfcollection tag worked fine but cfindex generated a null pointer exception. We didn’t find a solution to this online, but after some experimentation we shut down the ColdFusion 7 application server when we found it running, then restarted the ColdFusion 8 application service and the ColdFusion 8 search service. After that indexing worked fine.
Using ColdFusion Function Names
We noticed that ColdFusion 8 doesn’t seem to let you redefine function names in CFC’s that ColdFusion has built in anymore. Make sure to rename any of those that you might have used in the past.
Install the Documentation
For some reason unchecking the ‘Documentation’ option in the installer also means that the ODBC stuff needed to use access files as data sources also won’t be installed. If you use that, you need to install the documentation.
Anyway, all in all, besides installer issues, this upgrade is great and all of our sites are performing better.
This is my blog.
Hi everyone,
This is my new blog. A brief introduction…
My name is Max Glantzman and I am a full time web application and web site developer working for a marketing, design, and technology firm in downtown Boston. I am also a part-time performing musician at night.
Having been at the company at for over 3 years, I have made my way up to being the senior developer and team leader of our development team. My team has 4 other developers in it each with some different specialties and overlapping areas of knowledge. We generally use Adobe ColdFusion as our server side language and develop clients using either Flex, HTML with CFML in it, or HTML with Ajax calls to the server.
My day to day tasks vary very widely depending on the client and the project, thus the reason for this blog. For one thing I want to post technical questions when they come up and solutions I find interesting when those come up. Of course the occasional rant about a ridiculous client request will be included, as well as the random posting about my band in the music category.
When they feel so inclined, the members of my development team here will post questions and solutions as well.
Thats all for now.
-Max
