Missing Template Handler is missing in action.

Question

After a bit of struggle I found out how to input a missing
template
handler into our aged 4.5 Unix ColdFusion server. I was able
to have it
server up the custom 404error.htm file developed by our web
department.
And this worked, sort of.
The problem was that this HTML file makes use of Apache
<!-- include
virtual...--> directives which, of course, ColdFusion does
not understand.
So, I say no problem, I've dealt with this already before and
expanded
on some existing code that reads the html file and replaces
all these
virtual includes with the contents of the included file using
<cfile...>
tags and reFind() functions. This version even uses a Custom
Tag and
recursion to handle virtual includes inside of virtually
included files.
And this works great!
http://www.cdpr.ca.gov/errors/404error.cfm.
But when I then went into the ColdFusion administrator and
replaced the
HTML file path
'/rootDir/subDir/subDir/htdocs/errors/404error.htm'
with the corresponding CFML path
'/rootDir/subDir/subDir/htdocs/errors/404error.cfm' it stops
working.
ColdFusion starts to display the default ColdFusion 404 not
found error
rather then my specified Missing Template Handler.
What's wrong here? Why can't I server up a CFM file from the
exact same
place I can serve up an, albeit incomplete, HTML file?

Answer 1

User Since V1.5 wrote:
>
> I will be very happy if someone points out what I'm
missing.
>
Everything you have describe is true. The main point is that
sometimes
people do not want to and that there are reasons not to let
IIS handle
ColdFusion missing templates.
To be as clear as possible, if you have set IIS to check for
the
existence of a cfm file and then throw either a default or
custom HTTP
404 error page this will overwrite anything that could of or
would of
been done with a ColdFusion missing template page.
Sometimes this is a bad thing. For one example, there are
techniques
and development methodologies that build a 'template' or
'response'
completely in memory and a cfm file does not actually exist
in this
case. This is more advanced then many people work with but it
is
possible. In this case your having IIS check for the
existence of a
template would defeat the purpose. Another example is that a
server
wide missing template handler used by the ColdFusion server
can be
passed simple information about the error from ColdFusion,
this does not
happen with the IIS methodology.
So the missing template handler exists for cases where for
one reason or
another somebody does not want to have IIS checking for the
existence of
a cfm template before handing off the request to the
ColdFusion server.
As with many things in life, it is all about choices and what
works for
one person may not work for another.
A common difficulty with the missing template handler is that
it does
not necessarily live in the web server root. It has to live
in the Jrun
(aka Java) server web root which often is different then the
web server
root.
I.E. A common configuration may be this.
c:/inetpub/wwwroot <!-- web server root -->
c:/jrun/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/cfusion-war <!-- Java
server web
root --->
The latter is where the ColdFusion server wide missing
template hander
template file would have to live in this example
configuration.