How can I make AJAX Synchronous?

Question

As a virtual newbie (once a CF5 virtuoso returning to
programming after a 5 year delay), I'm thrilled to encounter the
AJAX capabilities of version 8. But I just hit a problem: After a
portion of my page loads (into a CFDIV via ColdFusion.navigate), I
would like to focus the cursor on a particular <input> tag
within it, but I get a Javascript error because the focus() tries
to execute before the target <input> tag gets into the page.
(To prove this, all I have to do is put an alert('waiting...')
message just before the focus() statement.) So this is one time I
need it to be synchronous. I notice in Ben Forta et al Adobe
ColdFusion Application Development Volume 2, p. 348, that there's a
setSynchMode for the <cfajaxproxy> tag (for other normally
asynchronous situations, too, I wonder?). And on p. 344 it is
stated that one can obtain 'a complete list of the available
JavaScript APIs at the link below:
http://www.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/htmldocs/help.html?content=Part_3_CFML_Ref_1.html
However, as of this afternoon, 12-24-2007, that link does not
work.
Four Questions:
1. How do I get to the API information? (I'll search the
website but I thought I'd ask now in case my search is fruitless.)
2. Can ColdFusion.navigate be set to be synchronous?
3. If so (in case the answer to question 1 doesn't provide
this), what is the correct syntax?
4. Or is there some other technique I should be using? An
'onload' in the AJAX-loaded form just occurred to me as a possible
solution, but my O'Reilly HTML book does not list that among the
form events...
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

First, many many thanks for solving HALF my problem. All I
had to do was remove the parentheses and the code is working
beautifully if the data to be loaded already exist in SQL Server.
When the data do not exist yet, the situation is improved - sort
of. Now placing the alert statement before the focus statement does
give it time to work, like what happens with the callback method,
though of course we can't have the alert statement there when it
all goes live.
The code on the server is as follows. In PostJob.cfm (it's a
system for court reporters to report back on how their reporting
job went), the server code says:
<CFIF HaveGenInfo>
<!-- Since we have the jobtype, display the General Job
Information from populateGenInfo right away -->
<cflayout type="hbox">
<cflayoutarea style="width:100%; height:117px"
source="populateGenInfo.cfm?jobtype=#Session.GenInfo.jobtype#"
/>
</cflayout>
<CFELSE>
<!-- Wait till we know the JobType, then provide a form
for General Job Information via ColdFusion.navigate -->
<cfdiv id='getGenInfo' name='getGenInfo'/>
</CFIF>
When an earlier SQL SELECT to GenInfo produces a record
(HaveGenInfo is true), as you can see, a <cflayoutarea> is
populated via source="populateGenInfo" (on which more in a moment).
When no record comes back, a <cfdiv> is waiting to receive
the data after the user tells us the job type, which he does via a
<cfwindow> containing a set of HTML radio buttons, which I
abbreviate here with only job type "1":
<CFIF not HaveGenInfo>
<cfwindow name="theJobType" title="What kind of job was
it?" headerStyle="background-color:c10026" modal="true"
height="130" width="400" x="280" y="90" initShow="true"
closable="false" resizable="false">
<input type="radio" name="JobType" value='1'
onclick = "JobTypeClick(this.value)">Transcript
</cfwindow>
</CFIF>
That takes us to JobTypeClick(), the code for which is:
function JobTypeClick(type){
ColdFusion.Window.hide('theJobType');
// for now we ignore the user's choice and go with type 1
ColdFusion.navigate('populateGenInfo.cfm?cfdebug','getGenInfo');
(as you can see, it begins by closing the window which asked
the user for the job type; an earlier version added the third
parameter, JobTypeCallback, not in quotes)
The goal is to pass the job type as a parameter to
populateGenInfo, although at present that's hard-coded into the CFM
in hopes of getting it to pay attention to my request to cfdebug
(which it still ignores, although I did set it for AJAX debugging
in the CF Administrator).
The code in populateGenInfo.cfm consists of:
<cfscript>action = Iif(Session.GenInfo.RecordCount eq
0,DE("insert"),DE("update"));</cfscript>
<cfset cjobtype="1">
<cfswitch expression=#cjobtype#>
<cfcase value="1">
<TABLE BORDER="1" CELLPADDING="4" WIDTH="100%"
CELLSPACING="1" class="blackbgtable">
<form method="POST" id="fmGenInfo" name="fmGenInfo"
action="saveGenInfo.cfm?jn=<cfoutput>#Session.sJobNo#&mode=#action#"</cfoutput>>
-- body of table goes here --
</TABLE>
/cfcase>
<!-- Add other cases later -->
</cfswitch>
<cfset ajaxOnLoad("JobTypeCallback")>
So that's it.
Any ideas?