G'day:

I am reposting this from my blog ("ColdFusion 11: ... how does normal CFML code and  code interact?") at the suggestion of Adobe support:

@dacCfml@ColdFusion Can you post your queries at http://t.co/8UF4uCajTC for all cfclient and mobile queries.

— Anit Kumar Panda (@anitkumar85) April 29, 2014

I have edited this in places to remove language that will be deemed inappropriate by the censors here. Changes I have made are in [square brackets]. The forums software here has broken some of the styling, but so be it.

G'day:
Another quick one. I'm raising these quick-fire questions here because Adobe have declined to suggest a better place to raise them, other than as comments on one of their blog entries. Well that was Ram's suggestion (which I don't think is terribly-well thought out). He declined to react to my suggestion that the Adobe ColdFusion forums might be a good place. Anit suggested Twitter or just emailing him, but I think there'd be public interest in this stuff, so don't want to resort to email.

As I'm the master of what goes on on this blog: I'll clutter this thing up.

Say I want to have a mix of "normal" CFML and <cfclient>-based CFML in the same file. I can only presume the intent is to allow this, otherwise having <cfclient> as a tag rather than just a file extension seems like a poor approach. Obviously if one can have a start tag and an end tag, then code can come before (and I guess after) the <cfclient> tags themselves.

So I'd expect this to work:

<cfset message = "G'day World"> <cfclient> <cfoutput>#message#</cfoutput> </cfclient> 

However all I get is an error in JS:

And, indeed, the only mention of message in the JS source is the one that's erroring (as it's on the right-hand side of an assignment).

So I thought perhaps <cfclient> worked like <cfthread> and I needed to pass attributes into it:

<cfset message = "G'day World"> <cfclient message="#message#"> <cfoutput>#message#</cfoutput> </cfclient> 

This doesn't compile:

Note also there's an error in the error message itself. It's not the <client> tag, it's the <cfclient> tag.

Rightio then, so I tried just using the request scope instead (the code's the same as the variables-scoped example, except using the request scope). No dice: same JS error.

As a last ditch effort, I just tried to see if <cfclient> was aware of anything going on around it, by passing a value on the URL, and seeing if <cfclient> saw that, eg:

<cfclient> <cfoutput>#URL.message#</cfoutput> </cfclient> 

This behaved differently from the variables- / request- scoped examples, in that I didn't get a JS error, I just got this on the screen:

undefined

And no JS error. It pains me to have to do this, but let's look at the generated JS to see why the behaviour is different:

Variables scope example:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/CFIDE/cfclient/cfclient_main.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/CFIDE/cfclient/cffunctions.js"></script> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"> <script type='text/javascript'> globalDivStruct=null; var _$variablesScopeVariable_func=function(){     var self=this;     var variables={};     self.__init=function(){         var localdivstruct=globalDivStruct;         var __output_var="";         var tmpVarArray={};         localdivstruct.outputvar+=message;        return""     } }; function __startPage__$variablesScopeVariable(){     document.write("\x3cdiv id\x3d'__cfclient_0'\x3e\x3c/div\x3e");     window.ispgbuild=false;     var clientDivStruct={         divId        : "__cfclient_0",         outputvar    :""     };     globalDivStruct=clientDivStruct;     try{         _$variablesScopeVariable=new _$variablesScopeVariable_func;         _$variablesScopeVariable.__init()     }     catch(__eArg){         if(__eArg!=="$$$cfclient_abort$$$")             throw __eArg;     }     __$cf.__flush(clientDivStruct) } __startPage__$variablesScopeVariable(); </script> 

The only significant difference (other than function names, based on the file names) between this and the URL-scoped example is the indicated line above is replaced by this in the URL example:

localdivstruct.outputvar+=__$cf.__arrayGet(URL,"message",true); 

So it's like it's trying to do the right thing, but just failing. I thought it might be because CF does stupid thinks with scope-key casing, and changed the <cfclient> code to expect URL.MESSAGE not URL.message, but this didn't work either.

So I'm flummoxed. I can't find anything in any documentation which might point me in the right direction, so anyone know what the story is here?

<script> message = "G'day World"; </script> <cfclient> <cfoutput>#message#</cfoutput> </cfclient> 

--
Adam