CFChart doesn't - need webserver setup advice

Question

I have a shared hosting account for my ColdFusion websites. One of my customers needs CFChart graphics for his statistics. I've programmed them and they run ok on my own development server, but they don't show up online. The reason is that ColdFusion puts the generated images into /CFIDE which is outside of my part of the file system, and not accessible for me in a shared hosting environment.

IMG SRC="/CFIDE/GraphData.cfm?graphCache=wc50&graphID=Images/4990209100100002.PNG"

The hoster uses IIS on a Windows machine and CF7. He has tried several things (configuration-wise), but so far, nothing helped.

What can we do?

-Michael

Answer 1

I'm not sure how you'd go about adding this to IIS, but, I've used this on apache to solve the same issue:

Alias /CFIDE /var/www/html/CFIDE
<Directory /var/www/html/CFIDE>
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
</Directory>
<Files ~ "^GraphData.cfm$">
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Files>

Answer 2

We have a site that creates statistical charts on a schedule. CFChart allows you to store the data to a variable (the "name" attribute). Then use CFFile to write the chart to any location within your webroot. We use it for Flash charts, but I've tested it with PNG as well, and it works fine.

Answer 3

I believe it would be possible to use the techniques described in this blog post: link text

And store the image in a location where the browser could get to it.