Recently I was finishing up a CFML project that's going to be run on top of Railo. Since this particular project was a redesign of an existing site, maintaining search engine rankings was a big concern. Many of the files on the new site had been relocated or renamed, so I was planning on using the onMissingTemplate method in Application.cfc to redirect users (and search engines) to the new files based on what had been requested.

Imagine my surprise when I found that Railo doesn't seem to recognize onMissingTemplate!

Every time a call to a non-existing template was made, Railo called onError instead of onMissingTemplate. After a little research, I determined that this was a bug in Railo and I decided to try to code around it. A little more research led me to an excellent code work around for this issue. I wish I could remember where I found it, but it was buried deep in some Google results. (please feel free to comment below if you know who originally came up with this solution)

The code is pretty simple, and this solution works nicely. Basically, when the onError method in Application.cfc is called it checks the server and the exception type to see if it's Railo and a missing template. If so, it calls onMissingTemplate and passes in the requested page name, then onMissingTemplate template does its thing. Please note, the code in the example is psudo code only and I have not tested it to verify it runs correctly.

But wait, there's more! I got everything implemented and put into production over the weekend. My onMissingTemplate method is called when it should be, and everything is working nicely. While I was working in the Railo administrator getting the site set up, I happened to check the Update link to see if there was anything I needed to add. Wouldn't you know it, one of the bug fixes listed in the latest update is "add support for onMissingTemplate to Application.cfc".

Just my luck...