This is a followup post to “Returning IDENTITY ID via ColdFusion 9′s CFQuery“.

Today I created an Insert statement that I needed the new identity value returned. It’s pretty simple, calling the result.generatedkey as such:

<cfquery result="myResult">
    INSERT INTO users( username )
    VALUES( 'test' )
</cfquery>
<cfreturn myResult["GENERATEDKEY"]>

The above code would normally result in the new identity value created for that record. However I received a “GENERATEDKEY is undefined…” error. Not sure what to think I dumped out the myResult variable, put the query into a file of itself and even tried using myResult.IDENTITY instead to no avail. After taking awhile figuring this out and ended up going home for the day and trying there again after a couple of hours. All of a sudden the standalone test worked!

So I’m thinking, okay this has to be some setting somewhere, and I was right. I narrowed it down to a query that runs before it during the login process for my website.

SET NOCOUNT ON

UPDATE TABLE1
SET COL1 = 'myVal'

Notice that I didn’t set “SET NOCOUNT OFF”. There lies the issue. Apparently when you set NOCOUNT off and keep it off, ColdFusion doesn’t retrieve the new Identity value. So the following code fixed my issue:

SET NOCOUNT ON

UPDATE TABLE1
SET COL1 = 'myVal'

SET NOCOUNT OFF

#cfquery, #coldfusion-2, #generatedkey, #identity, #nocount, #sql