A good rule of thumb inside a ColdFusion Component (CFC) is to set BOTH the output attributes of cfcomponent and cffunction to false.

<cfcomponent output="false">
    <cffunction name="foo" output="false">
    </cffunction>
</cfcomponent>

Normally I would think that the cffunction tag would inherit the output attribute and set its output attribute to false as well. However this is not the case.

The output attribute for cfcomponent only controls output in the constructor area, or everything outside of the functions. The output attribute for a function controls output only inside that function.

The other point to be aware of is if the output attribute is on, then any expression inside the pound(#) sign will be evaluated. If the output attribute is set to false then any expression inside a pound(#) sign will not be evaluated unless surrounded by a <cfoutput> tag. Rarely is there a need to use the pound(#) signs inside a function anyway unless it’s being evaluated in an attribute such as in <cfmail> or <cfswitch>. (See Mark Kruger’s blog on this)

Thanks to Ray Camden and O’Reilly’s Web Devcenter for enlightening me on this one.

Here’s another related article dealing with memory issues regarding use of the output attribute: http://wiki.mxunit.org/display/default/How+cfcomponent+output%3Dtrue++can+affect+memory+consumption

Many times you need to process textarea field content in ColdFusion and add HTML line breaks so it actually displays correctly on screen or in an email. An easy way to accomplish this is to replace the character codes 10 and 13 with <br>:

Replace(textVar, "#Chr(10)##Chr(13)#", "<br>", "all")

This code takes:

Line 1
Line 2

Line 3

And turns it into:

Line 1<br>
Line 2<br>
<br>
Line 3

I just installed varScoper 1.30 CF Builder (version 1) extension on my machine, but found a few issues getting it to run.

1. Make sure you put the varScoper folder in your Document Root you defined in your Server Settings. On mine this is the directory for my localhost.
2. Modify the cfbuilder.cfm file, in the handlers directory, and add:

   <cfsetting showdebugoutput="false">
   

   to the beginning of the file. You may need to open NotePad with Administrative privileges I found out for some reason.

3. It appears the “Description” window in the “Extensions” tab is broken for this extension. There is no fix as of right now.

Thanks to Ray Camden for the help on this.

Thanks to Ray Camden, I learned something new today that was of great help.

Inside the Application.cfc, I always assumed the “this” and “application” scopes where the same. This is incorrect.

“Application” scope will only store name/value pairs. It has no impact on how the application behaves on the server level (built-in behavior).

<cfset application.name = value>

While “this” scope is used to change the behavior of the application itself.  For example: defining custom tag paths and the common datasource name.

<cfset this.name= value>

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.