Easy cross platform and environment file paths

Posted At : March 12, 2007 10:26 PM | Posted By : Mark Lynch
Related Categories: ColdFusion, Farcry
One of the very useful and underrated functions in ColdFusion is the humble ExpandPath function. It has saved my life on many occasion and I just thought I'd explain how it works and what it does.

If you or dealing with file or directory manipulation on from CF then you will often need a way to get a file system path. You could just use it as follows:

<cfdirectory action="list" name="dirList" directory="c:\farcry\myApp">

This is of course very nasty as when you put this onto your live server you may not have farcry installed in c:\ - it may be somewhere completely different (particularly on shared hosting). Alternatively your live server may be a linux box in which case there is no "C:" drive at all.

To solve this and make you applications nice an portable you can use expandPath on a cf mapping. So assuming you have a cf mapping for /farcry to c:/farcry you would use the following:

<cfdirectory action="list" name="dirList" directory="#expandPath('/farcry')#/myApp">

This will now happily run on any machine that has the farcry mapping and will map to whatever location the mapping points to.

Cheers, Mark

del.icio.us | Linking Blogs
Comments
Comments are not allowed for this entry.
BlogCFC was created by Raymond Camden. This blog is running version 5.1.004.