Note: This blog post is from 2007. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Some may know the available FileName attribute, which allows you to save the output to a file. This NAME attribute is simply an interesting alternative.

Here's a quick example:

This creates a variable named test. How would you output it? CFCONTENT, of course, with the appropriate content type. If your page has created any other output, don't forget the Reset attribute as well:

To output a Flashpaper format report, use a CFCONTENT type of "application/x-shockwave-flash", and for a CFREPORT Excel spreadsheet, use a CFCONTENT type of "application/vnd.ms-excel".

Why might you do this?

Of course, if you just did that above, you might as well not have bothered, right? The point is that you may do something between when you create the variable and when you output it. For one thing, you may create it in one CFC, custom tag, or CFFUNCTION-based UDF and then output it later in the request.

More likely, you may choose this approach to facilitate caching and later reusing the generated output. Just as with creating a variable with any tag, you could have instead provided a prefix scope like session, application, or server. Then you could manage that cached result any of the many ways that have long existed for caching other tag results in shared scope variables.

Note: This blog post is from 2007. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

In the first iteration of this entry, I referred to the two approaches of either providing an empty ACTION or none at all, but as the comments below show, the former violates the HTML spec. So let's stick with the notion of an empty ACTION. Same result, though.

How often have we all seen code along the lines of:

or more involved:

All this could be replaced very simply with:

The form will post back to itself. I'll offer another post that shows a unique way to take advantage of this. In any case, I hope that this observation may help some folks.

(Update: I never got around to that other entry in 2007, but see a my reply to a comment below where someone asked for more info on the idea I had in mind.

Is this reliable?

Again, a clarification over what I wrote originallyhere. As was refined in the comments below, it's a violation to have *no* ACTION, but it's perfectly legit according to the URI spec (section 4.2 at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt) to have an empty ACTION, which is interpreted as a "same-document reference. (Thanks, Christopher Bradford, for that info.) Given that, even the following cautions seem needless, but I'll leave them for any still concerned.

If you have any hesitation, because you have to support multiple browsers and you can't test all possibilities, I'll understand if you choose to pass on this. But certainly if you only need to support browsers you can test, then if it works as expected, enjoy.

If anyone reading this can offer where this is the case, I'd appreciate hearing it. If you want some simple code to test, try this:

If it shows the text within the IF, then it worked as expected.

What about query string info?

You may wonder about the earlier more involved examples that showed passing the query string, in case any had been passed to the form. No problem. This technique passes any query string along just fine. Try it yourself (add ?test=test to the form and view in the debugging info that it's still in the URL scope after submission.)

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

The UGTV site is a directory of recorded UG presentations, now with 86 recordings from 65 presenters.

[....Continue Reading....]

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

[....Continue Reading....]

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

[....Continue Reading....]

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

I think most developers will find that it does what they want (tag insight, tag help, code snippets, and more), and it will do still more than they may expect. Still, it may trip some up at first as they make a transition. Changing editors is always a challenging proposition, just because we become so used to our current editor. Still, more and more developers are making the switch, and you may want to learn more about it.

[....Continue Reading....]

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Update for CF8: As an update to this entry from 2006, which is focused on CF7, I'll note that there was yet another approach that was added in CF8. Both still work and have their own value. More on the CF8 feature in my later blog entry. Still, the feature added in CF7 is important to understand, too, so please read on.

[....Continue Reading....]

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

I was able to arrange to get the corrected article posted in the electronic version of the article, free for you to read, on the CFDJ site. If you're interested in the topic and/or the article, please do check it out online.

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

[....Continue Reading....]

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

[....Continue Reading....]