Learn about updating ColFusion for MySQL in this Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Advanced training video series.


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Video Transcription

There is one last thing that I had to do in order to get this version of ColdFusion to work with the version of MySQL that I am using in this series. Before I show you this, I should tell you that this may or may not be necessary, depending on the version of ColdFusion that you are using. There may be a later release that has this taken care of. But either way, the tricks you will learn in this next lesson, like how to turn the Development Server on and off should be useful skills for you as you develop a website with ColdFusion. So let's close out of the ColdFusion Administrator. If you open My Computer on the PC and you go into the ColdFusion8 folder; of course if you are on a Mac, this may be in your Applications folder, you will find the file that caused problems for me in the lib folder. Now, I have these set to List, so I can easily see all of the files here. Depending on what database you are using you may want to verify that the latest files are available in ColdFusion for your database. In my case, this mysql-connector-java-commercial 5.0.3 turned out to be a problem; I needed 5.0.5, with the version of MySQL that I am using. Here is the warning, if you don't update a file like this, it can lead to some very strange bugs during development. If you open up the lib folder and you see 5.0.5 here, then you should be ready to roll with MySQL. If it's 5.0.3, then you can download a replacement quite easily, and you will find a link for that in your Project Files, in that Lesson 02 folder, in your Software to Download file. I am going to assume that you have downloaded that update and that you have unzipped it and its on your Desktop, like I have it here. Notice now I have a mysql-connector 5.0.5. To fix this, all I have to do is to remove the 5.0.3 and replace it with 5.0.5. But before I can do that, I have to turn off the Development Server. So I am getting an error here because the ColdFusion Development Server is still on. Here is the lesson that should be useful to you even if you don't have to update this file. On occasion, you may need to restart the server or turn it off to make changes like this. Here is how you do it. If you are on a PC, the easiest way to turn the ColdFusion server off is to go to the Start Menu; which you can do by pressing the Windows key or by just choosing Start. You want the Control Panel, and in Control Panel, you want Administrative Tools, and then Services. Once you get into Services, if I open this up, you can see there are a number of options here for ColdFusion. What we want to do is to turn off the Application Server, and the easy way to do that is simply to right click on Started and choose Stop. Now that we have the server turned off, we can go back to that lib folder and anytime you might need to replace files like this, you will need to turn the server off to do so. Now I can drag this file out of the folder, without error, and replace it with the 5.0.5 version. With that file in place, I can now restart the server and I am ready to proceed, knowing that ColdFusion is fully updated for the version of MySQL that I am using for development. Now remember, you will want to turn the server back on when this is completed. So we can close out of this if we are on a PC, go back to the Control Panel, to our Administrative Tools, to Services, to the ColdFusion Application Server, and start it. That should get ColdFusion all ready for everything we are going to do in the rest of this series.