Saturday, March 1, 2008

Coldfusion cfhttp Connection Failed error

OK, here is a very annoying problem that I have not found the answer for yet. Because of the JVM, Coldfusion caches DNS entries forever -- which means that if you move your server to another IP address -- even if you are setting up a new entry in your hosts file, you need to restart CF in order for the changes to be recognized by CF. I knew this already (after another annoying problem) but it still does not seem to explain the particular errorI'm dealing with. Here is the situation:

1. I am testing an app on a dev box that is set up to replicate the live server.
2. In the code CF needs to retrieve some xml that resides on the server and parse it.
3. Using cfhttp it tries to retreive the xml file, but keeps getting a Connection failed error -- but if I try to retrieve the data from the server directly, its there.
4. I checked the host file and sure enough the entry for the dev server is set properly -- I also restarted CF to handle the issue at the beginning of the post. Still no dice.

I'm out of options so at least in this particular case since I don't HAVE to get the file through http, I decided to just grab it directly using cffile and we're back in business.

The bad part is that in a day I'm going to have to test another part of the app that "requires" cfhttp, so the story is not over yet!

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