New File I/O in ColdFusion 8 - Part II

In my previous post I talked about how new file I/O functions address working with large files. In this post I will talk about other file functions that have been added in ColdFusion 8. Most of these functions are equivalent to the cffile operations and we have retained the same behaviour as cffile. A side effect of that is - relative paths used in these functions are relative to the temp directory. I don't really like that and I believe that it should have been relative to the template. But since these functions were supposed to replicate cffile behaviour, we had to live with it. :-)

Here we go with the list of those new functions

FileRead(filepath, [charset]) - Similar to cffile, this function reads the entire content of a text file and returns the read content. you can also opitonally pass the charset to be used to read the text file.

FileReadBinary(filepath) - This reads the entire content of a binary file and returns the byte array.

FileWrite(filepath, textdata | binarydata, [charset]) - Writes the specified content to the file. The content can be binary as well as text. If the specified content is a text data, you can optionally specify the charset so that the data can be written properly to the file.

FileCopy(source, destination) - As the name suggests, it copies the source file to destination file. Similar to cffile, if the destination is a directory, then source will be copied to that directory otherwise source file will be copied to the destination file.

FileMove(source, destination) - Moves the file from source to destination. Here again, if the destination is a directory, then source is moved under destination directory. Otherwise source is renamed to the destination.

FileDelete(filepath) - Deletes the specified file. The only important thing to note here is that if the file is readOnly, it will not be deleted.

FileSetAttribute(filepath, attribute) - Sets the attributes on file. Applies to Windows. 'attribute' here is a comma-delimited list of attributes to set on the file. Possible attribute values are "readOnly" | "hidden" | "normal".

FileSetAccessMode(filepath, mode) - Sets the file access mode for Unix or Linux systems where the mode is octal values of UNIX chmod command assigned to owner, group, and other, respectively. To give full permission to everyone for a file, the mode should be 777.

GetFileInfo(filepath) - So far till ColdFusion 7, there was no good way to find information like size, last modified date etc about a file. Only way you could do that was to use cfdirectory tag to list the directory, get the query from it, loop over the query until you hit the desired file and then fetch the required metadata. The new function GetFileInfo in ColdFusion 8 provides an easy way to get all the meta-data about a file or directory. This returns a struct which is described below.

• name - Name of the file/directory specified. This is just the file name and not the absolute path.
• path - Full path of the file/directory.
• parent - Full path of the parent directory.
• type - "directory" if the filepath is a directory else "file".
• size - size of the file in bytes.
• lastmodified - DateTime at which this file/directory was last modified.
• canRead - "true" if this file/directory has 'read' permission. "false" Otherwise.
• canWrite - "true" if this file/directory has 'write' permission. "false" Otherwise.
• isHidden - "true" if this file/directory is hidden. "false" Otherwise.