Hi Paul,
I used the BlackBox tag on a project last year, before I discovered FuseBox.
The basic motivation for creating the tag was to allow the developer to have a library
of custom tags that did not depend on the custom tags directory, in
c:\cfusion\customtags, or where the ISP did not allow tags to be uploaded. It also
seemed set-up for situations where the developer could not set mappings to a library
of files (ie, did not have access to CF Admin). A side benefit was that it had the
beginnings of a naming convention, and helped with sorting your code by category.
The basic benefit is similar to FuseBox, but the Tag becomes the wrapper to all your
custom tags, instead of the Index file. For example, if you have a library of tools,
you can call them ALL like this:
<CF_BLACKBOX tooltype="security" tool="securityme.cfm" attribute1="value1"
attribute2="value2">
HOW IT WORKS: BlackBox basically digs through the currently directory structure for a
specific "blackbox" directory, in a very similar way to how CF finds the
application.cfm Tools "types" are directories under the blackbox directory. That
way, the blackbox directory can be anywhere on your web site, and still find the
library of tools. The best benefit is that the paths to the tools are taken care for
you.
BEST BENEFIT: I could wrap all my tools(ie, custom tags) in the <CFTRY> statement
inside the <CF_BLACKBOX>, and display, and log all my errors consistantly. (This is
before I found out about how to do this with FuseBox). We also used it to strip out
white space. Basically, anything you use index.cfm as a wrapper for, can be done
with BlackBox.
HOW I WOULD OPTIMIZE IT: I would not set it up to dig around for the library of tools,
but set a global variable in my app that maps to them. That would speed it up
considerably, and all the tools could be found instantly. In other words, I would
just use it as a wrapper for my custom tags, not as a locator for the tag directory.
Also, since each tool "type" was just a sub-directory of the blackbox directory, I
ended up using the following simplfied convention:
<CF_BLACKBOX tool="security/securityme.cfm" attribute1="value1" attribute2="value2">
At 02:37 PM 10/17/00 +0100, Paul Johnston wrote:
>I have just come across blackbox. Can someone please tell me whether it is
>worth having a look at?
>
>It seems to have been written by a disgruntled fusebox-er of some
>description. It also looks as though it could be useful.
>
>Anyone? Is it any good? What are the good/bad points?
>
>Paul
>
>
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