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Coldfusion - The Magic Of 1
By Raymond Camden
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-03-21
Yesterday I was doing some training and my student asked me to explain the logic behind this code:
<cfif 1>
<cfdump var="#dharma#">
</cfif>
It was something so obvious to me that it never occurred to me that it may be confusing, and looking at it with a fresh eye I can definitely see it doesn't make much sense. Here is the method behind my madness...
Laziness. We've all had cases where we are working on a page and we need to quickly add some debug code to a page. Typically we just type it in like so:
<cfdump var="#dharma#">
Then if we want to hide it, but we know we aren't quite done yet, we replace it with this:
<!---
<cfdump var="#dharma#">
--->
So now to go back and forth we can add and remove the CFML comments. Well I'm lazy. I pride myself on my laziness. I don't want to have to add/remove CFML comments.
Plus I tend to typo that particular set of code. So I will often use the cfif 1 code instead.
When I want to hide it, I switch to:
<cfif 0>
<cfdump var="#dharma#">
</cfif>
In case folks don't get what the 1 and 0 means, they are shorthand for true and false. ColdFusion considers any non-zero number to be true.
Comments
About the Author:
Raymond Camden, ray@camdenfamily.com
http://ray.camdenfamily.com
Raymond Camden is Vice President of Technology for roundpeg, Inc. A long
time ColdFusion user, Raymond has worked on numerous ColdFusion books
and is the creator of many of the most popular ColdFusion community web
sites. He is an Adobe Community Expert, user group manager, and the
proud father of three little bundles of joy.
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