It’s well known that RDS shouldn’t be enabled on a production ColdFusion Server.

Over the years I haven’t been much of a user of RDS anyways so I usually just left it disabled.

Lately though RDS is starting to have a lot more value to me, I have been using ColdFusion’s Report Builder a lot more in addition to ColdFusion Builder itself, which use RDS a lot more to expose a lot of neat functionality.

ColdFusion Report Builder lets you connect and browse your ColdFusion data sources to build your report either through wizards, or construct (and test) your queries in real time.  Since ColdFusion Report Builder is from what I can tell, a repackaged Jasper Reports binary, it’s actually really nice to have a lot of the CF shortcuts built in.

ColdFusion Builder is something I’ve been using more and more in the past year.  I started slowly with the betas as the CFEclipse worked just fine for me.  As ColdFusion 9 came out though, a lot changed.  The integration between ColdFusion Builder and CF 9 is great.

I ended up having to find a mechanism to enable and disable (if needed) RDS.  Searched high and low, and forgot to check the knowledge base over at Adobe.

Lo and behold the explanation is simple:

1. In the root of your coldfusion path, you have a /wwwroot folder.  inside of it there is a file called web.xml
2. This file is used with the configuration of ColdFusion itself, and not only the internal web server.  So if you use another web server like IIS or Apache, this file is still relevant to edit.
3. When you open up the web.xml to edit, you’ll need to search the text for “RDS” and un-comment two spots where there are RDS services <!– commented out –> .. Both must be un-commented.
4. After you remove the comments and save the file, simply re-start the ColdFusion Server and RDS will be up and alive.  Use the ColdFusion Administrator to set your passwords as needed.

AND RDS WORKS!  Reverse the steps to disable RDS on production servers.

Hope that helps, I know I’ll be back to reading this post when I forget in the future.  The knowledge base article to enable or disable RDS in ColdFusion in this technote.  The ColdFusion MX instructions are applicable to CF 6 and up: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/172/tn_17276.html