Christian Cantrell

pretty cool. i wish this was out several years ago so we could have said "in YOUR face asp programmers" ;-) thanks, great tip.

CFHTTP returns a byte array - it might be cool if it returned the inputstream so that you could write the content out as you receive it.

I had tried this before (with the two getResponse calls) but it didn't work within my Fusebox application.

Would Fusebox's use of <cfsavecontent/> prevent this technique from working properly?

Am I missing something here? To me your 12 lines of code can be done in one:

I guess if there's a requirement for some manipulation to take place between the file read and the data output, then yeah, but otherwise...?

Adam

Oops. This time I'll escape my < / > and you might see what I meant!

<cfcontent type="image/jpeg" file="#webDir#/home/cantrell/Pictures/Corrs2.jpg">

Adam

That will work if you want to server an image from disk, but what if you get the bytes of the image from a URL or from your database? In the example, I grab they bytes off of disk just for conveninece.

Christian

We tried the simple solution, however since CFCONTENT can be restricted due to security concerns, then you can use the above as a work around as well.

This code doesn't seem to work in MX 6.1. Is anyone else having this problem, and do you have a solution for it?

Dave

Never mind, if you comment out the out.close line, it works. It also works on MX with this line commented out.

I'm slightly confused...what does this do when you store images in a DB that the following will not do?:

<cfcontent type="#getImage.ContentType#/#getImage.ContentSubType#">
<cfoutput>#ToString(GetImage.Store)#</cfoutput><cfabort>

This is fantastic! I'm pumped to go try this with the Apache FOP classes. I was always stuck with taking a pdf that was dynamically generated out of the fop java class and storing it to disk, then using cfcontent to get it to stream to the browser. It always bugged me because the save to disk just seemed like a complete waste of time and resources. They have great servlet examples on the apache fop site but they always relied on the byte array. THANK YOU (in advance because I haven't tried this yet but I'm encouraged for the first time in a long time).

Can this be done with PDF and Word Docs?

I'm getting an error (java.lang.IllegalStateException
) when I try to use this script. This error is the result of using the getOutputStream method on the response structure because getWriter has already been used (I'm assuming by a subclass). How did everybody else avoid this error, and how do I get past it? Thanks, Ryan.

Thanks. I have tried this and it works great.

I'm using it with cfhttp to get a byte array of a pdf then used the writeTo method to write to the out stream using this getResponse() twice.

Once again thanks a lot.

I am pulling binary out of a DB so I am trying this:

context = getPageContext();
context.setFlushOutput(false);
response = context.getResponse().getResponse();
out = response.getOutputStream();
response.setContentType("#FileInformation.FileType#");
response.setContentLength(arrayLen(#FileInformation.FileContent#));
out.write(#FileInformation.FileContent#);
out.flush();
out.close();

#FileInformation.FileContent# is the field from the db. I figure since it is being pulled as binary already no need to read it or convert it right? Then why cant I get this to work? Any ideas? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Never mind...the same problem as the first post on this page...it didnt work because it was in the Fusebox framework...Thanks!

Works great, I use FOP to generate PDFs in Memory and serve them up.

As for the close statement, I imagine the compiled servlet (from the cfm in mx) would like to close the stream itself and when you close it first you mess things up for the remainder of the server (hence the bitching).

The timing is impecible that I just found this post. However, I've not had luck in getting to where I need to be. So far a CF test page I created will display a graphic file stored on a remote server properly. The problem is simply that is all I can see on the page. No text, no other HTML markup, etc.

I need to have a standard HTML page appear with an image I retrieved from a database or a remote folder share. Any ideas? I've erased the out.close(); call as he mentions.

Please help! =)

Well, your post just helped me figure out a long time nagging problem. I have been working on a CF wrapper for JFreeChart to generate on-the-fly charts, and have been stumped with corrupted output, until I saw your fix about the double getResponse() method calls. With that change, all works great! For those who don't understand WHY you might need to do this, here is sampe code that creates a bar chart on-the-fly (no caching on the file system) and outputs directly to the browser a JPEG image:

barDataset = CreateObject("java", "org.jfree.data.category.DefaultCategoryDataset");

Randomize(numberformat(timeformat(now(),"ss")));
rval = int(randrange(1,500));
barDataset.setValue(numberformat(rval), "2001", "Q1");
rval = int(randrange(1,500));
barDataset.setValue(numberformat(rval), "2001", "Q2");
rval = int(randrange(1,500));
barDataset.setValue(numberformat(rval), "2001", "Q3");
rval = int(randrange(1,500));
barDataset.setValue(numberformat(rval), "2001", "Q4");
rval = int(randrange(1,500));
barDataset.setValue(numberformat(rval), "2002", "Q1");
rval = int(randrange(1,500));
barDataset.setValue(numberformat(rval), "2002", "Q2");
rval = int(randrange(1,500));
barDataset.setValue(numberformat(rval), "2002", "Q3");
rval = int(randrange(1,500));
barDataset.setValue(numberformat(rval), "2002", "Q4");

chart = CreateObject("java", "org.jfree.chart.JFreeChart");
chartfactory = CreateObject("java", "org.jfree.chart.ChartFactory");
chartorient = CreateObject("java", "org.jfree.chart.plot.PlotOrientation");
chartutil = CreateObject("java", "org.jfree.chart.ChartUtilities");
chart = chartfactory.createBarChart3D
("Sample Bar Chart",
"Category",
"Value",
barDataset,
chartorient.VERTICAL,
true,
true,
true);

response = getPageContext().getResponse().getResponse();
response.setContentType("image/jpeg");
chartutil.writeChartAsJPEG(response.getOutputStream(),
100, // jpeg quality 0-100
chart, // chart object
500, // width
300); // height

response.flush();
response.close();

If anybody else needs help with the above code, email me.

cheers

Andrew, what's your e-mail address? I've got some questions about jFreeChart. That code works perfecly.

This looks great, but I can't get it to work. I'm running a straight install of CF MX 6.1 developer version on XPpro. I'm using ABCpdf, a com object which converts web pages to pdf's. It seems to work well.
Here's my code:

<cfset theDoc.Save("C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\howard\sbc\html2pdfr\abcpdf\pagedhtml.pdf")>
<cffile action="readbinary" file="C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\howard\sbc\html2pdfr\abcpdf\pagedhtml.pdf" variable="theData"/>
<!---<cfset theData = theDoc.GetData()>--->
<cfscript>
context = getPageContext();
context.setFlushOutput(false);
response = context.getResponse().getResponse();
out = response.getOutputStream();
response.setContentType("application/x-pdf");
response.setContentLength(arrayLen(theData));
out.write(theData);
out.flush();
out.close();
</cfscript>

Everything preceding the above code is communicating with the com object to create the pdf. There is nothing after the above code.
I've tried populating theData from the com object (the commented out line), and from the pdf produced by the com object (the not-commented out line). I've tried removing the x- from the mime type. I've tried passing the call to the com object directly into write(). I've tried commenting out the last two lines, singly and in combination. No matter what, I get a screen full of what I assume is the binary treated as text.
The pdf file opens fine in acrobat, but something is obviously going wrong between reading it in, and writing it out.
One thing: the browser sees the file as having a .cfm extension? Does that matter? If so, how do I fix it?
Any pointers would be much appreciated.

Oops, my bad. It works. Apparently while trying something earlier, I trashed IE. It looked like it was refreshing the page, but just kept loading the same old mess, even with refresh every time selected. So it looked like nothing worked. Nothing like closing and reopening IE as part of one's testing process.

Thanks for a very cool solution!

This is awesome, Christian. Thank you very much.

I have a follow-up question. In your example, you knew the mime-type of the binary data you were going to display. If you didn't know, is there a way to determine this from the binary data itself? I have a database storing documents in different formats - could be ppt, pdf, doc, etc. When I pull back the binary data, is there any way to dynamically determine the mimetype? Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

Thx for the code. Now no more writing to temporary file.

Can someone please show an example of querying the database and getting the filed out of the database in order to display the image? I cannot seem to get it to work properly. My filed uses an Access database with field type of OLE Object (stores images in database). Your help would be greatly appreciated!

I know this is a really old post, but the following may be useful to others (especially on CFMX 7):

I've found that you need to reset the response before closing the OutputStream otherwise you leave the thread in an unusable state for future requests (which leads to the "The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request." error from CF and, more specifically, a "Response has already been committed" error from JRun).

With that, this code cleans up the response correctly:

out.write(byteArray);
out.flush();
response.reset();
out.close();

Christian:

I used your code sample in a cfm file that is reading an oracle blob field. the prolbem is when i try to read a file larger than 62K i get an error that the file has been corrupted. do you know a way around this or perhaps is there a cf server setting i need to change? i am running cf 7. any help would be appriciated.

thanks.

Found the perfect use for this, and experimenting now.

I've been trying to figure out the equivalent of PHP FLV (flash) streaming but with coldfusion, this seems to be the trick.

Take a look at the PHP code from:
http://www.flashcomguru.com/index.cfm/2005/11/2/Streaming-flv-video-via-PHP-take-two

I will post my code once I get some more testing done.

Steve.

Got the code working, you can now stream .FLV files using coldfusion http://www.realitystorm.com/experiments/flash/streamingFLV/index.cfm