How can I link to a JavaScript file above the site folder in ColdFusion 10?

2
votes

Here is the problem. The company I work for has a number of sites, and many of them use the same jQuery UI widgets, like datepicker. I would really like to have just one copy of each widget in an _javascript folder on the top level of the server. The problem is that because the code is outside of the site folder, I need to use ColdFusion mappings to point to it. Apparently you can't use these with script or link tags however. It doesn't expand the mapping. So I tried using "ExpandPath" and got a message that it doesn't have permission to access that resource. Some research turned up that JavaScript can't access files on local file systems because that would be a security hole. So, although it was ugly, I tried wrapping the CSS file in tags and the JS file in tags, and then included them with cfinclude. That worked- sort of. The main issue is that apparently the css uses relative links to link to the images used, and those are all broken because the JS is included on a page in another folder from the script and images themselves.

Here is my question. Is there any good solution here? I don't think that what I want to do is unreasonable, but should I give up and just keep a copy of the widgets in every site folder? Thanks in advance for any help.

2
javascriptcoldfusioncoldfusion-10

2 Answers

6
votes

Included javascript files, like CSS files, don't have to be touched at all by the ColdFusion processor. You just use ColdFusion to craft the link and feed it to the browser like you would any image, attachment, or link to another site. The only difference is that this link is in a <script tag. So if you have several sites and want to access a common /js directory on all of them the work has to be done in the web server itself (IIS/Apache).

In your web server of choice make a virtual directory (or symbolic link) to your javascript directory called /js (or whatever name you choose). Do this for all the sites, and you have one /js directory that is accessible from all the hosted domains.

0
votes

My situation is that all our ColdFusion work is intranet only. While we only have a few sites, that is more than one. We also use a development server as opposed to having people develop on their hard drives.

The first thing we did was to create a mapping on "/" to point to a certain directory. Let's say that it's c:\fred. In c:\fred we have subdirectories named images, css, js, udf, etc. That allows us to do stuff like this:

<cfinclude template = "/Templates/Reportheader.cfm">
<link rel= "stylesheet" type= "text/css" href= "/css/cashflow.css" title= "style1">
<script type="text/javascript" src="/JS/browserDetect.js" ></script>

in any application.