Custom 404 pages in a shared Cold Fusion environment.
I recently ran across an interesting problem with configuring ColdFusion. We run a shared hosting environment for some of our sites, and the time has come to start putting custom error handling in for all the sites to email us when there was a problem.
As you already know (or should, check out the livedocs) each application or site can have its own custom error handler by using a tag (typically in the application.cfm). What I was aiming to do was set up a custom error handler and custom 404 handler for each site… with the look and feel of each site.
The easy part to this config was the error handler. To simplify some of the coding, I made a custom mapping to /error/ on our server and created an error file that handles emailing us when there was a problem (including the form scope, cgi scope, and the error structure). This file is then called by an error.cfm file in the root of each site that wraps it in the look and feel of the site, displaying a nice, friendly error.
This is where things get dicey. After much searching, I could find nothing on setting up a custom 404 page in much the same way. Everything I found only referred to the global error handling page in the cfadministrator. This is when I had a brainstorm.
Again, using the custom mapping that was created, I added a custom 404.cfm in the /error/ mapping, and used this as the global missing template file. This file, in turn, extracts the full path of the web root of the site you are in, and includes a custom 404.cfm in the root of the site.
Assuming you have a common root for all the sites on the server, you can extract all the information you need from the CGI scope to make an absolute call to your new 404.cfm.
So, there you have it…. Custom error and 404 pages in a shared hosting environment!