Moving from CFEclipse to CF Builder: First Experience

This morning I held my breath and made the switch from CFEclipse to ColdFusion Builder. To keep things clean, I decided to install the standalone version. The install itself was painless, and so far CFB seems really snappy.

The first thing I did when it opened was point it at my old CFEclipse workspace so that I wouldn’t have to import my projects. In order to do this CFEclipse must be closed. Go to File > Switch Workplace > Other and browse to your old workplace folder. CFB will have to restart itself, but it does so very quickly. After starting back up, the first thing I noticed was that the snippets were missing. Snippets and shortcuts are important to me, and I really didn’t want to have to create them all over again, so I dug around in my workspace metadata and found them.

By default, cfeclipse seems to store them all in [workspaceroot]\.metadata\.plugins\org.cfeclipse.cfml\snippets.  If you changed this folder in CFEclipse, all you have to do is (in CF Builder) go to Window > Preferences > ColdFusion > Snippets and update your snippet path. Since I’m moving away from CFE, I figured it would make more sense to not rely on a CFE folder to store my snippets, so I copied all the xml files from the default path above into [workspaceroot]\.metadata\snippets, closed the Snippets view, and opened it up again, and they all popped up.