Properties file load to ColdFusion via java.util.Properties
Problem
You have one or more standard properties files that you'd like to load into a ColdFusion struct.
Solution
We can leverage Java's java.util.Properties to quickly load properties files.
Detailed explanation
ColdFusion certainly makes it easy to parse through a properties
file "manually" with
cffile and some simple list functions, however, the
Java class
java.util.Properties already does the work of loading
a properties file. It can accept various forms as specified by the
class'
load(Reader) .
For the following example, let's say you have a file called
properties.ini that contains the following:
# App properties prop1 = value1 prop2 = value2 prop3 = value 3
Here's a simple example to show how we load these properties
into a
java.util.Properties object and then get a
property:
file = expandPath( './properties.ini' ); properties = createObject( 'java', 'java.util.Properties' ).init(); fileStream = createObject( 'java', 'java.io.FileInputStream' ).init( file ); properties.load( fileStream ); writeOutput( 'property1 is ' & properties.getProperty( 'prop1' ) );
It is then very simple to create a ColdFusion Component (CFC) that will abstract and encapsulate this little bit of Java work for you, and also allow you to pass a list of properties files to the init() method (allowing you to load multiple properties files into one properties object in just one line of code!).
The attached folder contains a Properties.cfc file, which will allow you to load files as follows:
files = 'sample1.properties,sample2.properties,sample3.properties'; properties = createObject( 'component', 'Properties' ).init( files ); writeOutput( 'key1 is ' & properties.getProperty( 'key1' ) );
The attached folder also contains an example.cfm template, with some sample usage code, and three sample properties files.
I should also note that the built-in ColdFusion function getProfileString() is relevant here, however, I just don't like having to pass an absolute file path to this function every time you want to retrieve a single property value. I'd also imagine that there's a slight performance hit if you reference this function frequently (guessing it must parse through the INI file each time, to find the section/property requested).
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license, pertaining to the examples of code included within this work are available at Adobe.
