Unqualified XML's and cfheader
I've been playing around with creating an XML file this morning from a plain .cfm page and came across an annoyance. Now I've done this loads but this morning I was creating my own Ajax functions which meant the cfm page had to return a fully qualfied as XML which was passed into Javascripts XML parser, but Js was passing an error. The test code was simple
[xml.cfm]
1<cfheader name="Content-Type" value="text/xml">
2<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
3<root>
4 <node>
5 <child>1</child>
6 </node>
7<root>
2<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
3<root>
4 <node>
5 <child>1</child>
6 </node>
7<root>
The problem was CFHEADER adds a couple of blank lines to the top of the page meaning that the page did not pass as XML. Well thanks to Rob Wilkerson on CF-Talk the anser was obvious simple - use CFCONTENT
1<cfcontent type="text/xml" reset="Yes" />
2<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
3<root>
4 <node>
5 <child>1</child>
6 </node>
7<root>
2<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
3<root>
4 <node>
5 <child>1</child>
6 </node>
7<root>
I did try a few other ways of surpressing the white space usin a variety of methods but nothing came close.
Comments
I am getting on the AJAX bandwagon late but I guess I better keep this tip in mind.
I came across this cause I was playing around with my own implementations. I havent played around with CFAJax etc for a while but from what I remember this isnt an issue with them (I might be wrong) so don't forget to check em out.
I've been doing a lot of XML/XSLT work lately and have found a couple of other mind-bending tweaks that I've had to track down and find:
1. If your ajax response bombs, alert the responseText. I found the responseXML returning null because the XML returned with whitespace in front of the xml declaration. Wrapping the code in <cfprocessingdirective suppresswhitespace="true">..</cfprocessingdirective> fixed that. was a beast to track down, though.
2. When creating XML documents using <cfxml> all whitespace is preserved when the toString() method is called on it. This left little gaps between values and their tags because I wanted to format the xml nicely for readability. Then those gaps caused issues in my XSL because my "value" did not equal 'YES', but equalled 'YES ' instead. Ugh. Using normalize-space() in my XSLT took care of that.
No doubt there are a thousand other little things I haven't run into yet, but those are a couple that took me a while to find so maybe my pain can help someone else.
1. If your ajax response bombs, alert the responseText. I found the responseXML returning null because the XML returned with whitespace in front of the xml declaration. Wrapping the code in <cfprocessingdirective suppresswhitespace="true">..</cfprocessingdirective> fixed that. was a beast to track down, though.
2. When creating XML documents using <cfxml> all whitespace is preserved when the toString() method is called on it. This left little gaps between values and their tags because I wanted to format the xml nicely for readability. Then those gaps caused issues in my XSL because my "value" did not equal 'YES', but equalled 'YES ' instead. Ugh. Using normalize-space() in my XSLT took care of that.
No doubt there are a thousand other little things I haven't run into yet, but those are a couple that took me a while to find so maybe my pain can help someone else.
this post helped me get out of a jam when transposing ajax examples from PHP to ColdFusion. thanks!
