Hi Guys Is it possible to use variables inside the CF Admin GUI? I saw this:

[refer to image attachment]

It seems that: > { application.home } Is referring to a variable of some sort? Do you know where I would set a new placeholder variable, like: > { application.dsnHost } I have 300 DSNs and I don't want to change each one, every time I switch DB servers? I have searched in:

\\wsl.localhost\Debian\opt\coldfusion2018\cfusion\runtime\conf\server.xml
\\wsl.localhost\Debian\opt\coldfusion2018\cfusion\runtime\conf\web.xml

But I cannot find anything?

I'm not sure if you can add anything but application.home is set in the CFROOT\INSTANCE\bin\jvm.config file.

Not sure if your particular datasources can be configured/altered this way, but using the cfsetup CLI tool ( https://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/using/cfsetup-configuration-tool.html ) may be one way to export settings and then re-import them after a global search/replace.

Unfortunately, that tool doesn't work with ACF2018 and prior versions.

is there any qualms to utilizing commandbox and cfconfig ...

How about setting them procedurally in application.cfc? Don't remember for sure if that's supported for 2018, but I think so. Out of curiosity, why so many DSNs? Are you a hosting provider or something? We have "a lot", but not close to that many, and we already don't like it. Keeping our ducks in a row across multiple dev, stage, and production environments is Not Fun (tm). We have an environmentConfiguration.cfm file, called by application.cfc, that sets those and other stuff according to the domain being accessed.

OK. I did try adding a new entry to `CFROOT\INSTANCE\bin\jvm.config`:

java.dsnHost=<http://foo.rds.co.uk|foo.rds.co.uk>

And then I added

{application.dsnHost}

to the correct place, but the verification failed. So, clearly it didn’t work. In the end, I just did a find/replace on the host name in `neo-datasources.xm`l and then swapped over the old file with the new file and everything works. In future, I just need to switch between the two

neo-datasources.xml

files to achieve what I need. But thanks for the help everyone. It would be really great, in a future release of Coldfusion, if they could add the following feature: Add a section called CF Admin Variables, where we can set placeholder variables that can be used all over the CF Admin GUI 🙂

Shouldn't that be

application.dnsHost=<http://foo.rds.co.uk|foo.rds.co.uk>

?

Hmmm. Well, all the other variables in the

jvm.config

file, use the java scope?

Hmm, seems to be something with multiple instance install. I see

application.home=C:/ColdFusion2021/instance_name

just before Arguments to VM section.

Yes. But I cannot see:

application.home=

Anywhere, in that file?

Yes, it doesn't appear to be in the default instance on a multiple server install or in a single server install.

I can see it read, in a few places, but I cannot see where it is written, so I presumed that:

java.home

Was being used, instead?

Yeah, I couldn't find any documentation either.

This really feels like it would be worth exploring defining datasources using

this.datasources

in your

Application.cfc

. You could set environment variables in your OS or in your jvm.config file to define the "global" variables, then access them when defining the datasources in

Application.cfc

. This allows for having different values for the "global" variables on different servers (development/testing/staging/production) without having to alter your CFML code. Defining multiple datasources this way has been supported since CF 11. Alternatively, as previously mentioned by @Michael Schmidt, you can use CommandBox and the CFConfig module to export/import the configuration settings that you typically use ColdFusion Administrator to manage. You could export just the database connections, edit them in a text editor, and then reimport them back into ColdFusion. This does not require you to use CommandBox to start/stop servers. You can use it just for this purpose if you want.

This sounds like a job for CFConfig, TBH