this code used to work, but now it doesn't - what could have changed?

[bluetang]

I'm really hoping this is going to be one of those obvious things that I just can't see because I'm looking too close...

Last Thursday we finally migrated our intranet from coldfusion 4.5 onto MX. Everything looked fine until Friday morning when it lost it's ODBC connection to the Access database and then fell over completely with everyone getting 'page cannot be displayed' messages.

We reinstated the iis website on the original server, copied the access database back and re-pointed the DNS entries so our users could get back on again.

The problem I have now is that some of the code (running on 4.5 again) which worked fine before last Thursday, and which hasn't been changed at all (it's encrypted) is now not working.

In particular the problem seems to have affected the search facilities. I'm getting errors on the process pages saying the form.parametername parameter is not defined and if I try to <cfoutput>#form.parametername#</cfoutput> I get the same 'Error resolving parameter form.parametername' error

We are also getting coldfusion errors when the intranet administrators try to log in, but again this all worked fine before last Thursday.

I've looked long and hard at the problem and I can't see any reason why these problems should have occured.

If anyone has ANY suggestions at all I would be eternally grateful!

Many thanks in advance

 

[csteinhilber]

Tell me you didn't migrate from 4.5 to MX in your production environment straight-away. You always, always do upgrades on a developmenet server first... and test the heck out of everything.

As you know, MX doesn't use ODBC directly. It either uses an ODBC bridge built as a JDBC driver, or ColdFusion's MX ODBC Agent Services. So you have to make sure that either the bridge is installed, or the agent services are running.

New to MX, though, is the stipulation that ALL Access DSN's and ODBC Socket DSN's must now authenticate... even if no authentication is required on the actual datasource. Check out Macromedia's release notes at

http://www.macromedia.com/support/coldfusion/releasenotes/mx/knownissues_mx_j2ee_p2.html#db

for more info.

That's probably where 90% of your issues are coming from.


As for your 'Error resolving parameter form.parametername', there shouldn't be any reason why MX would treat FORM parameters any differently than 4.5, so I'm at a loss to explain that one... unless you're counting on your Access datasource to build the initial form, and certain form elements aren't getting built now.

Try doing a

<CFDUMP var=&quot;#FORM#&quot;>

at the top of your action/ok page to see if the parameters you are expecting actually exist.


As for your administrators not being able to log in... are you talking about logging into CF Administrator? Or your app? If it's your app, I'm guessing that it's because CF can't access your database... which I assume drives the login mechanism. If that's not a fair assumption, then you'll have to provide more details about how your login works, and what errors your administrators are getting.


You can't expect an upgrade of this magnitude to go off without a hitch. There are incompatibilities between 4.5, 5.0, and MX that will break certain code. It's the nature of the beast. Given that MX has been completely rewritten on a completely different platform, in a completely different language... I count my blessings everyday that they're as compatible as they are.

-Carl

 

[bluetang]

no, the contractor we got in to do the migration has upgraded our development and test servers and tested them before all this went ahead.

the problems described above are in cf 4.5, not mx as we rolled the intranet back to its original server when mx lost it's database connections.

i'll forward your comments onto him to see if they're of any use.

thanks

 

[csteinhilber]

Ahhhh... so you reverted back to 4.5, and the code that used to work on 4.5 now doesn't work?!? That sounds odd.

Could be some different registry entries that MX made when you installed it that are now incompatible with 4.5... or different settings in CF Administrator than you originally had.

Or there's a pesky custom tag somewhere that got updated (either manually or automatically) that some of your other encrypted templates are using.
-Carl

 

[bluetang]

Thing is, we didn't move any code when we reverted back to 4.5. The two versions are on two seperate servers so all we did was copy one Access database back to the original server, create a new 'website' in IIS on the original server and re-point the DNS.

Thanks for all your help anyway

We've been testing the whole thing on the development and test MX servers this week and these problems don't occur, so we're going to migrate the production system next monday evening - wish us luck.

Thanks again