As you have probably read already, ColdFusion Builder 2 has been released to Adobe Labs. There have been quite a few blog posts already about some of the new features and enhancements in this release and I would like to talk about one of them....the new ColdFusion search.
When you are using ColdFusion Builder 2 and use the 'ctrl+f' (cmd+f on OS X) keyboard shortcut, you will get a different search dialog. The default search dialog looks something like this:
You can see that some of the same features exist, such as wrapping the search (when you reach the end of a document, it will go back and search from top until it gets to the point where the search started), cases sensitive searches, using regular expressions and searching incrementally (searching while you type) .
You will also notice that form here we can choose the 'scope' of what we want to search. You can choose from the current document, open documents, projects, working set, workspace, local directory, FTP location or RDS location. I simply love this level of granularity, especially searching a local directory. This means that you can preform a search for files that are not in an Eclipse 'project'. I also love that we can choose one or more projects to search.
By far, my favorite feature in the new enhanced search is that we can search by tag and attribute. This is something that has been in Dreamweaver for quite some time, and one of the few features of Dreamweaver I have missed since switching to Eclipse based IDEs. With ColdFusion Builder 1 if you wanted to search for a <cfquery> tags where the datasource name was, shall we say, 'moo' you had 3 choices:
- Search for 'moo' and sift through all the results to find what you need.
- Search for 'cfquery' and sift through all the results to find what you need.
- Create a regular expression that looks for a cfquery tag with a datasource named 'moo'
(not as easy as it soiunds since we can never really be sure where the 'datasource' attribute is in relation to the 'cfquery')
Neither of these options is particularly appealing and can be time consuming, now we have the ability to perform a search like this quickly and easily. Here is what the interface looks like when you want to search by tag/attributes.
On large projects, this can be a huge timesaver as you can quickly apply a fine filter to your search criteria. You can also use this feature to search tags that have (or don't have) a 'sub tag', such as <cfmail> and <cfmailparam>.
Lastly, like other 'searches' in Eclipse, if you search more than the current document, you will get a list of matches in the search panel. The list show will show not only the files in which a match occurred, but also show you each instance within the file and double clicking on an instance of a match in the search panel will not only open the file, but it will open the file and 'scroll' to the point of the match you clicked on.
We can see from the above image that the search for 'moo' found a match in layout.cfm on line 28 ('smoothness'). If I double-clicked this entry, layout.cfm would open, the ficus would be brought to line 28 and the matching text would be highlighted.
There are a lot of other new features and enhancements in ColdFusion Builder 2, so, go..download it and start enjoying the goodness...
