The same goes with the new ColdFusion AJAX tags, such as cfgrid. All of the functionality can be achieved hand-coding it yourself using CFCs and the Ext JS library. But why would you?

Sure, when you look at the source, its not exactly the same as one might hand-code themselves; but if you can look past that, there is some powerful functionality that is really easy to tap into.

If you simply need a paging datagrid, for speed and ROI, it’s hard to look past the built-in capabilities of cfgrid. It’s value for your money as far as your clients are concerned, and profit for your own business. Little advertised by Adobe, but you can extend the functionality of tags like cfgrid via the well documented Ext JS API.

I’ve decided to throw together a few examples, and further explore the possibilities of using cfgrid and other ColdFusion AJAX tags rather than rolling our own all of the time using jQuery.

I knew about the cfprint tag but wanted to make sure it is up to scratch, so I wrote a quick example of how it works.

It’s a great tag, and a welcome addition to ColdFusion 8. You need to provide a UI / workflow however to reprint (in case the printer fails, etc) as the tag doesn’t really give you any notification of success/failed attempts to send to the printer (I suppose this is outside the scope of the tag, and where the operating system picks up).

Anyway, you can checkout the example. There’s not much to see online, but you can download the example and run it locally – its all server side printing.