Introduction to the Cold Fusion Administrator

To access the administrator, the Cold Fusion server must be running.  See the Cold Fusion installation instructions regarding starting and stopping the server.  

To access the server locally, type http://localhost/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm or http://localhost:8500/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm is Cold Fusion is installed using the stand-alone server.  To access the Cold Fusion Administrator on a remote server, one would replace localhost or localhost:8500 with the DNS name or IP address of the remote host.

Creating a Data Source

Before you can use a database in a Cold Fusion application, you must register the data source in the Cold Fusion Administrator.  If the server is running on a machine using Windows 98 or ME, you must use a JDBC-ODBC Bridge to connect to a data source.  To do this, first create a system DSN in Start>Control Panel>ODBC Data Sources>System DSN and then connect to this using Cold Fusion Administrator.  Under Windows 2000 and XP, for Access and many other databases the data source can be created entirely within Cold Fusion Administrator.

Cold Fusion Mappings

This setting in Cold Fusion Administrator is limited to use with cfinclude and cfmodule tags.  It does not provide a solution to the issue of wanting to test locally your Cold Fusion files that are located outside of the root directory of the server, which is by default c:\CFusionMX\wwwroot  (For example, wanting to test files that are a floppy) The solution to that problem is found in editing an XML file -- the instructions for which are found at www.macromedia.com/support/coldfusion/adv_development/config_builtin_webserver/config_builtin_webserver08.html

Revised: September 9, 2002. Comments to William Pegram, wpegram@nvcc.edu