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ColdFusion Builder Trial: connecting up RDS

My it's been awhile hasn't it?  New job, old job, and other jobs between have been keeping me more busy than I can even relate.

Just for kicks I've decided to give the CFBuilder trial a whirl.  It's being evaluated by the office, and we were having some issues connecting it up to RDS on our local machines.  This lead to the some exploring to find out where the problem lies.

First I went out and grabbed CF Builder 2.  http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-builder.html.  After it got done installing I tried setting up an RDS interface to my local CF 9 install.  And, whoops, hit upon the same error my co-worker saw.  It's fairly unhelpful, mostly just a null java pointer exception.  It lead me to this page on the Adobe forums http://forums.adobe.com/message/4234561, but offered no real resolution.

It dawned on me that RDS was likely not enabled during the installation of CF 9 on my current laptop.  I did the following to address the issue with RDS not connecting (note, some steps may not be necessary, such as adding a new RDS user, but it didn't work for me without one).

  • Open your ColdFusion administrator interface and under the security left hand navigation set both administrator and RDS to use Separate user name and password authentication (allows multiple users) .
  • Create a new RDS user and give them every authority under the sun (eh, it's local).
  • Open up the ColdFusion instance web.xml, and this will vary depending on how you installed ColdFusion.  Mine was found in C:\ColdFusion9\wwwroot\WEB-INF.  The multi-server install will be in a path similar to <jrun-install>\servers\<instance>\cfusion-ear\cfusion-war\WEB-INF.
  • Do a search on RDS.  There should be two separate <servlet> mappings which need to be uncommented.  Uncomment each block.
  • Restart ColdFusion.
  • In CF Builder add a new server for RDS (or edit an existing one).  It was a tab in the bottom pane of the program for my installation.
    • Server Name:  This can be any value, it's just used the purpose of display
    • Application Server: I'll presume you're using JRun
    • Host Name: localhost
    • WebServer Port: 8500 for standard install, consult jrun.xml if you're using multi-server
    • RDS User Name: Name used in the previous step
    • RDS Password: Again, from a previous step
    • Click Next
    • Server Home: Mine was C:\ColdFusion9, not sure where this is on multi-server
    • Document Root: It defaults to wwwroot for the ColdFusion9 folder, and I don't see a reason to change it.
    • Click Finish

After the above, both my co-worker and I were able to successfully connect to our RDS services.

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Comments (Comment Moderation is enabled. Your comment will not appear until approved.)
Phillip Senn's Gravatar New job? Are you still near Charlotte? I need someone to tutor/mentor me.
# Posted By Phillip Senn | 4/12/12 3:43 PM
Matthew Williams's Gravatar I'm about 3 hours from Charlotte at this point. I'm closer to Raleigh, unfortunately. In January I started a position with Lockheed Martin as a contractor to the EPA. This will be my third time around with EPA ;).
# Posted By Matthew Williams | 4/12/12 4:42 PM