Flash forms and how not to upgrade CFMX7

When the honchos at work decided to put some business processes on the intranet, I felt it was the best time to start putting flash forms to its paces. Process automation could be fiendishly difficult with so many validations. I hardly use JavaScript because some dude could have its browser saying capital NO. And server side is not the easiest stuff to do, and the roundabout trip could make the sanest man go schizo! With AS2, and some codes stolen from Flex, client-side validation in flash forms is so lovely. Work gets done fast, server-side codes are more compact and reusable.

I did some work at home over the weekend, and it worked beautifully. I was impressed and couldn’t wait to wow my colleagues. Now, time for the production server to play host, and duh! The application fell flat on its face. One, the <cfformitem type=”text” and type=”htm” refused to show. Two, clock icon continues ticking forever and three, worst of all, data wouldn’t load into the forms.

The honchos didn’t waste much time asking for my head on a platter. I started looking for answers. Didn’t get much except for a clue from Ray Camden about bad CFIDE mapping. I compared my settings with the dev servers but it was fine. Along the line, I discovered that only servers that were upgraded from CFMX6.1 have same problem (oh, my app was tested on all the servers in the world!). I did a double take; sent out an outtage report and downed the production server. Copied my settings, uninstall the CFMX7, deleted every trace, and reinstalled and presto, life came back to me. The app worked, the honchos smiled and I had a pizza.

The trouble came from a ‘wonderful‘ trick of replacing your CFIDE in wwwroot (default settings for Windows/IIS6 install) with the old one from CFMX6.1 when you upgrade to CFMX7. Because we are one of the early adopters of CFMX7 around my end, I just looked for what seemed to be the smartest upgrade method on fullasagoog. Only God knows who thought it was smart, but I did it.

Author: Adedeji Olowe

Adédèjì is the founder of Lendsqr, the loan infrastructure fintech powering lenders at scale. Before this, he led Trium Limited, the corporate VC of the Coronation Group, which invested in Woven Finance, Sparkle Bank, Clane, and L1ght, amongst others. He has almost two decades of banking experience, including stints as the Divisional Head of Electronic Banking at Fidelity Bank Plc. He drove the turnaround of the bank’s digital business. He was previously responsible for United Bank for Africa Group’s payment card business across 19 countries. Alongside other industry veterans, he founded Open Banking Nigeria, the nonprofit driving the development and adoption of a common API standard for the Nigerian financial industry. Beyond open APIs, Adédèjì works deeply within the fintech ecosystem; he’s the board chairman at Paystack. Adédèjì is a renowned fintech pundit and has been blogging on technology and payments at dejiolowe.com since 2001.

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