Using ColdFusion Custom Tags (cf_)
A new part of ColdFusion our development team has been looking into more is the custom tags (cf_). Soon to be used with the Polar CMS (Visit official site), custom tags allow you to have scripts and coding within a tag that can be called from a cfm page as shown below:
<!— CFM Page (cfcustomtag_caller.cfm)—>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
<title>Call Tag</title>
</head><body>
<cf_cfcustomtag customVar=”test”>
<p>SOME HTML</p><cf_cfcustomtag form=”testFormCode”>
</body>
</html>
As you can see we are using a new tag <cf_cfcustomtag> with custom variables (customVar=”test”). These variables can be picked up within our custom tag cfm file we are about to create.
<!— CFM Page (cfcustomtag.cfm)—>
<cfoutput>
<cfif isDefined(“ATTRIBUTES.customVar”)>
<h1>#Now()#</h1>
<p>#ATTRIBUTES.customVar#</p></cfif>
<cfif isDefined(“ATTRIBUTES.form”)>
<p>#ATTRIBUTES.form#</p>
</cfif>
</cfoutput>
The above is a simple CFM file which has HTML and ColdFusion code. As you will notice we have named the file ‘cfcustomtag.cfm’ which is the same name as the tag: <cf_cfcustomtag> just without the cf_ at the start. Coldfusion will look for any files with the same naming tag.
You may ask why not use a <cfinclude> tag, but with cfincludes they can be slower and you are not able to reuse the cfinclude as easy as a cf_ custom tag. With custom tags you can lower the amount of code you need by using the extra variables (ATTRIBUTES).
Hope you enjoy using custom cf_ tags. Feel free to comment and add your code to show better ways of using cf_ tags. You may also want to research <cfmodule> tags.
We have been hosting websites since 2002 and are always moving forward. All articles written under the Host Media author are created by the team who support our customers.