Chris Geirman | It's all about React Native these days, with a nod to ColdFusion and CFWheels

Here’s the situation. I went to Scheduled Tasks in CF Admin and was confronted with the following error….

The following information is meant for the website developer for debugging purposes.

Error Occurred While Processing Request

The system has attempted to use an undefined value, which usually indicates a programming error, either in your code or some system code.

Null Pointers are another name for undefined values.

The error occurred in scheduletasks.cfm: line 188

-1 : Unable to display error’s location in a CFML template.

The cause of this turned out to be a corrupted neo-cron.xml file found in the cfusion/libs folder. In fact, it was completely empty.

When faced with this issue, you can do one of the following to resolve. Be sure to restart services after each option.

#1 – Recover with BAK

There may be a neo-cron.bak file. You could try replacing the contents of neo-cron.xml with the contents of this file. The benefit of this is it may save your scheduled task descriptions. Retrieving a version from another server may be another option, if you’re in a multiple-server environment.

#2 – Start Over

The XML is actually a WDDX file, so replacing it with a bare-bones file will at least get you going again. You will have to define each scheduled task again.

7 Comments

Um…. What version of CF does this work for. We have this problem at our workplace, but can’t find any backups of the neo-cron.xml to use in perforce.

Doug R on: January 21, 2015 at 10:43 am Reply
Good info Chris, I needed the blank template so this was helpful. By they way, I see you are using WordPress here for your blog instead of the far superior ColdFusion platform. Any particular reason? 🙂

Mike on: January 21, 2015 at 10:48 am Reply
- Haha… Glad you found this helpful. WordPress is just silly simple to setup
  
  Chris Geirman on: January 21, 2015 at 11:20 am
I don’t know what Adobe would do if we did not have a gracious CF Community. This helped me immensely today after trying to understand why my Tasks would not come up or run after I replaced them. Thank you!

Tony Cap on: January 27, 2016 at 10:32 am Reply
- Awesome Tony, thanks for leaving a note. Super glad it helped.
  
  Chris Geirman on: January 28, 2016 at 8:10 am
This article is still helpful! 🙂

We cloned a CF10 server and had issues with the CF Scheduled Tasks so we used your bare-bones XML to recreate the neo-cron.xml.

Thanks!

Scott on: February 16, 2017 at 12:06 pm Reply
- You’re very welcome… glad it helped 🙂
  
  Chris Geirman on: May 3, 2017 at 11:34 pm