reCAPTCHA on Wheels

reCAPTCHA is unique in that users solving the CAPTCHAs are helping universities and services like Google Book Search scan words from books that weren't picked up properly by OCR technology.

Credits

This plugin is based on code from the ColdFusion reCAPTCHA tag by Robin Hilliard.

There are 3 components to using reCAPTCHA in your Wheels application:

• Configuration
• Display of the reCAPTCHA widget
• Validation of user input

Configuration

First, you need to obtain an API key from reCAPTCHA.net. You'll need to set up keys for each of your environments, so you may need one for your development domain and your production domain, for example.

Once you obtain public and private keys, you should set these values in your different environments' config files (config/design/settings.cfm, config/production/settings.cfm, etc.):

If you prefer setting your custom configurations in events/onapplicationstart.cfm instead, you could also create code similar to this in that file:

You could always have cfswitch evaluate the current domain name instead of the Wheels environment too if that's your preference.

Display of the reCAPTCHA Widget

Just use the showCaptcha() function to display the widget in your form.

The showCaptcha() function accepts 4 optional arguments.

Validation of User Input

You use the validateCaptcha() function within your controller action to validate the user's input. It will return true if the test passed and false if not.

Here is an example:

Configuration for Offline Development

Sometimes you need to run your application without access to the Internet. And the reCAPTCHA widget and validation service both require a connection to the Internet! Maybe you're building your application while on the plane or in the airport.

We have a setting that allows for offline development. In your configuration, simply set application.hasInternetAccess to false.

This will cause reCAPTCHA on Wheels to show this text in place of the widget:

[NO INTERNET MODE] reCAPTCHA would go here

In this mode, the validateCaptcha() function will always return true as well so that reCAPTCHA functionality will not get in the way of testing the rest of your form.

When your application's environment is set to testing or production, this setting will always be overriden to true, so do not fear of accidentally forgetting to change it back to true before deploying to staging or production.