Chris 11:16 pm on February 8, 2011

Ternary Operator within ColdFusion 9

For the first time today I used ColdFusion’s new ternary operator. I learned about it last week as a alternative to the inline-IF (IIF()). No longer do I need to remember the quarks about the DE operator required in IIF.

A ternary operator takes three arguments: ((condition) ? trueStatement : falseStatement)

Example:

<tr class="#(currentrow mod 2) ? 'lightRow'  : 'darkRow'#">

This can also be done using inline if:

<tr class="#IIF(currentrow mod 2, DE('lightRow'), DE('darkRow')#">

Or using cfif:

<tr class="<cfif currentrow mod 2>lightRow<cfelse>darkRow</cfif>">

As you can see, you can use a simple inline operator without having to worry about IIF quirks or drawn out conditional statements. Remember this is introduced in ColdFusion 9.

Dan G. Switzer, II 4:46 pm on February 18, 2011

You don’t even need the ternary operator, you can just do:

#(len(arguments.arg1))#

Since CF treats positive numbers as a true value and zero as a false value it’ll work. If you want to be more explicit, you can use:

#(len(arguments.arg1) gt 0)#

This has worked in CF for as long as I can remember. It certainly works in CF6+ (but I think even in CF5.)
- Chris 5:07 pm on February 18, 2011
  
  Thanks for that great suggestion! I could have avoided a lot of headache if I would have just thought simplier. I’ll have to come up with another example for the Ternary.
  - Chris 1:54 am on March 18, 2011
    
    My previous example created some discussion on the efficiency of the code, so I updated the examples above.
Tim 12:37 pm on March 17, 2011

thanks for this..really useful.

however inside of a query param setting null=true if there is a length on your argument wouldn’t give the desired result as far as I understand it?

eg: #(len(ARGUMENTS.arg1)# == true and would set the DB to NULL when it should have set the db

so your second example really should be #(len(ARGUMENTS.arg1) EQ 0)#

Just trying to make sure i fully understand so please correct me if I am wrong. thanks a lot for this useful snippet makes code so much more efficient without the performance hit of IIF() and evaluation quirks related to its use.

cheers,
tim
- Chris 1:58 am on March 18, 2011
  
  You are correct, you would want to do something similar to this:
  
  cfqueryparam value="#arg1#" null="#not len(arg1)#"
  
  Thanks for the feedback.

Chris Tierney

ColdFusion Web Application Server Stack Blog

Ternary Operator within ColdFusion 9