The eclipse/cfeclipse combinations makes for a pretty powerfull developing tool for ColdFusion programmers, even those who miss the good old days of using Homesite!
One of the cool things cfeclipse brought over from Homesite is snippets, but cfeclipse has a few extra goodies to make them better than ever :)
Whereas in Homesite you would assign a keyboard shortcut directly to a snippet, cfeclipse has an invoke/trigger key combination which stays the same while allowing you to use ANY key(s) as the actual trigger text for the snippet.
For example I have a cfabort snippet with a trigger text of ‘a’. Now in eclipse 3.2 the invoke/trigger combination is ctrl + j, so if I type the letter ‘a’, then press ctrl + j I get a lovely cfabort tag! Doing things this way allows me to have the same invoke key (ctrl + j) then simply remember my trigger text for each snippet. Nice :)
In common with Homesite is the idea of snippet variables, most handy if your snippet text requires or relies upon a user defined parameter value. An example here is cfinclude where you must specify the ‘template’ attribute.
To setup snippet variables you use the $${variable:default} format. My trigger text is ‘i’ for cfinclude, so when I invoke the snippet I get asked to enter a parameter value as follows:
My entire snippet looks like this:
There are a number of built in snippet variables:
$${DATE} $${MONTH} $${TIME} $${DATETIME} $${DAYOFWEEK} $${CURRENTFILE} - Current file name (just the file) $${CURRENTFOLDER} - Current folder (The path to the containing folder) $${CURRENTPATH} - Current path (full file name) $${CURRENTPRJPATH} - Just the folder $${USERNAME} - Current user $${MONTHNUMBER} - Month as a number $${DAYOFMONTH} - Day of month as a number $${DAYOFWEEKNUMBER} - Day of week (the week starts on Sunday) $${DATETIME24} - DateTime24 - a 24 hour clock version of datetime. $${YEAR} - Current year. $${YEAR2DIGIT} - Current two digit year.
Other than those, you’re free to name your variables as you wish.
Another SUPER cool feature is the ability to choose a default value from a range. So for my cflocation snippet I have:
<cflocation url="$${url:.cfm}" addToken="$${addToken:false|true}" />
Note the use of the pipe (|). There is even more than this on the cfeclipse.org site so take a peek. Some of the snippets I use are:
cfabort cfcomment cfdump cfinclude cflocation cfoutput cfquery cfscript html comment (used with xml files)
I also use tonnes of snippets for HTML, (strong, em etc). Using snippets is easy to learn and saves you a LOT of time when you’re used to invoking them with ease!
Have a look here for a complete list of my snippets, you can also download them for easy use