Over the past couple of weeks I have been writing quick tutorials on extending the built in AJAX components. Today I would like to show you an example that I believe everyone is going to find useful. Once you have a data grid displaying your data there are usually 2 key operations users will perform. The 1st is pagination of records which is built into the grid and is pretty easy to use. The 2nd is filtering or how can I find exactly what I am looking for without browsing all of the records.

The other day I wrote a short article on ColdFusion 8 custom grid toolbars. One reader had a question that I would like to share with you. Trond writes - Do you know if a similar toolbar can be added to the bottom of a cfwindow? The answer to this question is two fold. No there is not a panel are on the bottom like there is in the grid or even in the window components in Ext 2.0. This does not prevent you from customizing your windows though.

I have been showing you how to extend the cfgrid component lately by tapping into the Ext framework. Earlier I wrote a tutorial about creating context menus. Henry liked it but had one concern, lets look at his question. How do u hide CFGRIDROWINDEX in header context menu -> Columns ?

Many people have asked how they can add custom toolbars to their grid components. In Ext 2.0 they are built in to the grid panel but in 1.1 they are built in to the grid view. It is the same concept but just tackled a little different. As we all know ColdFusion 8 ships with 1.1 so we will focus on that version. So why the need for custom toolbars? Well our example makes a case for both a header and footer toolbar.

In our previous example I showed you how you could create a context menu using cfgrid and some Ext magic. Now I would like to take that example a step further. I good use case for a context menu on the grid is giving the user quick access to view or edit the record just by right clicking on the row. Using our new found knowledge and CFWindow this will turn out really nice.

ColdFusion 8 has some great AJAX features built in as we all know. One of the more popular tags is the cfgrid in HTML format. This grid as we know really just wraps the Ext 1.1 framework. One question I see often is how can add some context menus to my grid. This would be both when you click on a row in the grid and on the grids header. This tutorial should clear up some of the questions everyone has been asking. First off I need to say this is not perfect. I do tons of Ext 2.

A couple weeks ago Kevin Hoyt was here in Cleveland on the Flex 3 Pre-prelease tour. He was actually interested to hear what I had to say about my cfExt project. After the presentation we sat down and talked about why I started it, what it is and where I think its going. Kevin has posted the interview in mp3 format and you can listen to by visiting his blog below.

The Flex 3 Pre-Release tour stopped here in Cleveland and it really revived my interest in Flex & ActionScript 3. With that I was able to come up with some ideas for projects at work. As these smaller projects come through I hope to share as much as I can. The project was to create an interactive Flash component for viewing our Clients Newspaper ads. I can not share the exact details of the project but I will use a substitute for the examples.

My good friend Todd Sharp asked me to keep this one quiet until his presentation but he blogged about it today so the cat is out of the bag. Ever since ColdFusion 8 came out one thing users wanted to do was change the look and feel for the Ajax components. People have hacked away at the css with no easy answer. The answer was there all along though. Basically themes in Ext are a css file that point to a different images collection folder.

The GWT-EXT team has announced the release of version 2.0 this week. The project is a combination of the Google Web Kit and Ext. What I wanted to point out to everyone was the showcase application they built to demo their examples. The demo is well put together and does a couple things very well. First off It gets you excited about the project and the different components you can build. Next for each demo you have a source view that shows what code was used to produce the demo.