Example::

SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE x in (a, d, c, b )     

Result::  a b c d

The default ORDER BY clause in this case sorted the result in a descending fashion, however I need the result to be returned as follow.

Result:: a d c b

So how does one get such a result??

By using the the ORDER BY FIELD  clause. This little nifty function allowed me to return the result exactly as hoped and did not require me to further manipulate the results afterwards using another programming language. Below is how you would structure this cool function.

Example::

SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE x in (a, d, c, b )
ORDER BY FIELD( fieldName, a, d, c, b )

Well this is because the data you get from the getData() function are loaded from the Object Broker, which caches the data for fast retrival, therefore when you do an update manually via cfquery tag, this change was not registered in Object Broker. Here’s a handy little snippet of code that will do the trick!

<cfset application.fc.lib.objectbroker.RemoveFromObjectBroker(lObjectIDs=objectid,typename='dmHTML') />

The sample code above allows you to update the cache of a dmHTML object in the Object Broker cache.

<cfset factory = createObject('java', 'coldfusion.server.ServiceFactory')>
<cfset allTasks = factory.CronService.listAll()/>
<cfloop index="i" from="1" to="#ArrayLen(allTasks)#">
    <cfdump var="#allTasks[i]#" />
</cfloop>

This script basically returns a list of schedule tasks on the server!

In some circumstances it is important to make sure that the case that you enter your struct keys with is not altered, and you are probably thinking that surely whatever case you use it is maintained, but this is only in true under some circumstances. One of my amazing colleagues in our development studio has a situation where the case must be maintained at lower case converting a struct to a JSON packet to be consumed by a facebook application, but because of the way she was building the struct, CF forces the keys to upper case. Check out the example below:

<cfset stPerson = structNew()>
<cfset stPerson.name = "Sandy">
<cfset stPerson.address = "12 Amazing Street">
<cfset stPerson.suburb = "Amazingville">
<cfset stPerson.state = "SA">
<cfset stPerson.phone = "54321234">
<cfdump var="#stPerson#">

and the result:

Check out the keys, they are all forced to upper case! Why? , well I found this on another CF developer blog and it sounded pretty good – “ColdFusion internally represents structure keys in uppercase when the keys are created using dot notation. Dot notation is typically how programmers write their code and is considered to be best practice when working with structures.”

So there you go…. but how can we maintain case you ask? well, quite easy, don’t create your structs using dot notation, explicitly set your key names by wrapping them in single quotes, check out this example:

<cfset stPerson = structNew()>
<cfset stPerson['name'] = "Sandy">
<cfset stPerson['address'] = "12 Amazing Street">
<cfset stPerson['suburb'] = "Amazingville">
<cfset stPerson['state'] = "SA">
<cfset stPerson['phone'] = "54321234">
<cfdump var="#stPerson#">

and the result:

See!! the case of the keys has been maintained!!!

<cfsavecontent variable="htmlStr">
	<cfoutput><p>
	<cfloop query="qPets">
		<cfif qpets.cat EQ "dog">
			Some other string about dogs<br>
		<cfelse>
			Some other string about cats<br>
		</cfelse>
	</cfif>
	</cfloop></p></cfoutput>
</cfsavecontent>

Would probably produce something like this:

		<p>
							Some other string about dogs<br />


			Some other string about dogs<br />



					Some other string about cats<br />

	</p>

<cfsavecontent variable="htmlStr">
	<cfprocessingdirective suppresswhitespace="true"> 
		<cfoutput><p></cfoutput>
		<cfloop query="qPets">
			<cfif qPets.cat eq "dog">
				<cfoutput>Some other string about dogs<br></cfoutput>           
			<cfelse>
				<cfoutput>Some other string about cats<br></cfoutput>           
			</cfif>
		</cfloop>
		<cfoutput></p></cfoutput>
	</cfprocessingdirective> 
</cfsavecontent>

And the results are:

<p>Some other string about dogs<br />
Some other string about dogs<br />
Some other string about cats<br />
</p>

http://www.dbschemaeditor.com/OnlineDB.aspx

‘If you are using CFQUERY, then you should always use CFQUERYPARAM when passing in typed data, end of story’.

OK, that was a bit short and dull, here are 3 very good reasons:

1. Reduces the risk of SQL injection attacks
2. Makes data more ‘SQL happy’, escapes problematic characters, eg: single quotes, forward slashes etc…
3. Forces you to think about the data being passed into your query, less mistakes made.

Not enough information for you? read this excellent article from Adobe – http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/htmldocs/help.html?content=queryDB_5.html#1142383

No other language has an easier, more elegant and quicker debugging utility that gives as much detail and information as CFDUMP. It is one of my favorite things about developing in Coldfusion, if only there was some way of getting the same sort of information in a similar manner in Javascript…. well it turns out that there is!

I was wandering around the web when I stumbled across John Bartletts Coldfusion tips n tricks. He has taken some code that essentially dumps a javascript array and given it Coldfusion like formatting. I have often wanted something just like this to save me the hours of developing ways to debug large arrays of javascript data and now here it is –

http://johnwbartlett.com/cf_tipsntricks/index.cfm?TopicID=85

Give it a shot and I am sure you will agree it is a beautiful thing.