Hugo Sombreireiro

Adobe Developer Week presentations are now available for on-demand viewing at the Adobe website! Check them out if you missed any of them or just want to revisit some of that interesting content! Go here!

A new site dedicated to the development of ColdFusion backed Flex application is now online at http://flexcf.com. It carries some interesting content already and more is announced to be available soon. Keep an eye on it

I was really entusiastic when I heard that Adobe had launched AdobeTV, a video content website. So I went there and I was really glad with what I found. People sharing experiences, useful tutorials and case studies and from what I’ve heard there’s a lot more to come. So, I just can’t wait! Check it out here!

CF 8.0.1 brought several updates and features, all of them useful. But to some of my projects there’s one that most people wouldn’t qualify as the must exciting one, for sure. It’s the ability to have CFPDF creating watermarks defined by HTML (or just text).

Previously I’ve used both DDX or iText to cover my needs but the possibility of doing it easily without having to rely on external resources it’s much appreciated both by myself and some of my customers.

And, like everything else in ColdFusion, it’s sooo easy.

For a quick example, on how you can easily create a PDF with text watermark and serve it to your users let’s create a simple a document:

<cfdocument format="pdf" name="somePDFDocument">
<!--- Lets create some paragraphs --->
<cfloop index="x" from="1" to="5">
<p>
Aliquam turpis libero, cursus eu, tristique sit amet, elementum sed, dolor. Duis convallis, velit ut hendrerit pellentesque, eros diam sagittis libero, nec sodales ligula libero sed nunc. Suspendisse tellus lorem, dapibus quis, iaculis et, pretium vel, odio. Vestibulum risus massa, porta non, suscipit et, ullamcorper eget, ligula.
</p>
</cfloop>
</cfdocument>

Ok, so now I can add a watermark saying: “Yay, I can do this now!”:

<cfpdf action="addWatermark" text="<b>Yay I can do this now!</b>" source="somePDFDocument" foreground="true">

And that’s pretty much it! If you feel like or have to you can format your watermark text using cfsavecontent and then just add the variable name to the CFPDF tag like this:

<cfsavecontent variable="myWatermark">
<b>Yay I can do this now!</b>
</cfsavecontent>

<cfpdf action="addWatermark" text="#myWatermark#" source="somePDFDocument" foreground="true">

Obviously you still need to serve the document to the user:

<cfheader name="content-disposition" value="attachment; filename=""newWatermark.pdf"""/>
<cfcontent type="application/pdf" variable="#toBinary(somePDFDocument)#">

Adobe released ColdFusion 8.0.1 yesterday. Among several bug fixes there are some cool new features such as:

• Mac OSX native support
• 64-bit OS support, including XP, Vista, Windows 2003 Server, Mac OSX Leopard, RedHat Linux 5, Suse Linux 10 and Solaris 9 & 10
• Enhanced attributes collection
• User interface components upgraded with ExtJS 1.1.1
• Updates to some cfml tags

For a complete list of changes please visit the release docs here.

Among this new cool features there’s one I find to be very useful to me, the new ability to include HTML watermarks directly from cfpdf, without the need to use DDX or iText. I’ll blog about this new feature next.

You can download ColdFusion 8.0.1 updater HERE!